The Fourteenth Declaration Day* Party Is Canceled!

June 18, 2021: It's a shame, but the unforeseen has arisen, and Doreen and I are compelled to offer our apologies. I hope that you all have an excellent Declaration Day celebration wherever else you find yourself when the time comes.

I hope, too, that you will consider reciting the real Pledge of Allegiance that you will hear in the video below with whomever you are sharing the day.

(Get the pledge text here.)

*Declaration Day: The day the American colonists expressed their intention to be free and individually sovereign at any cost, even that of their lives. Although it is true that an important kind of independence was realized that day, it was an independence of the spirit only. Nobody found themselves free to go about their business the next day, unmolested in the exercise of their new liberty due to having laid their claim to that liberty. It was not until many bloody years after formally declaring that they

"...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;"

and recognized

 "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed,"

and

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness;"

that Americans actually found themselves able to exercise a true, hard-won independence.

The declaration was the key and critical first step. It put the sacred honor of the declarants at stake in their faithful enforcement of that bold resolution. Once having said that

"...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is [the people's] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security,"

there's no going back to subordination with one's honor intact.