On many stages recently, I have spoken about the need for a leader to respect the individual. It is not enough to talk about "people," like many politicians do so dangerously at this time in the electoral process, but rather it is of supreme importance for leaders to focus upon and respect the rights and "evidence of the Creator" apparent at the level of the individual. What this means is that each individual is special and has equal rights under law.
Whenever we get off track and sacrifice individual rights on the altar of "people" as a broader category, we begin treading down a path where eventually no one will have individual rights or liberty. For proof of this, witness the murderous and bloody results of the French Revolution, which was founded on principles at first similar, but upon closer inspection, radically different than those of the American Revolution. The difference between the two is the American focus upon the rights of the individual, versus the French focus upon "Fraternity" or "the group."
Interestingly, the foundation for this belief system in the United States of America originated in a document that was intended to be revolutionary. The Declaration of Independence was drafted as a document to justify to a watching world why thirteen disparate colonies were choosing to do the impossible and unthinkable and overthrow their soveriegn monarch. Only as a bi-product was the Declaration of Independence supposed to enumerate the fundamental creed that America would base its system of law a
nd Bill of Rights upon.
Thomas Jefferson is given credit for the authorship of the Declaration, even though he was part of a five man committee responsible for its creation, and even though the document went through revision by the entire Second Continental Congress. Still, history shows that the opening salvo of words that establish the foundation of the American Creed of which we are speaking, were indeed Jefferson’s creation. Interestingly, these opening fifty-five words were hardly debated or modified at all by the committe or the Congress. They read as follows:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Apparently the truth of these opening words really were "self-evident" to the founders. According to my favorite historian, Joseph Ellis, these opening words would "grow in meaning to bec ome the seminal statement of the American creed. With these words, Jefferson had . . . casually and almost inadvertantly planted the seeds that would grow into the expanding mandate for individual rights that eventually ended slavery, made women’s suffrage inevitable, and sanctioned the civil rights of all minorities."
Abraham Lincoln, too, understood the significance of these words on the direction of America, writing, "All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all co
ming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of the re-appearing tyranny and oppression."
Whenever our candidates or representatives or elected officials veer off track, whenever our leaders begin steps towards tyranny (read Communism, Socialism, etc.), whenever the rights of an individual is sacrificed for the "common good," the words in the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is there as a timeless protection. May we never forget it.
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