Making our celebration about 'All Rights for All!'

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Christopher B. Daly / Special To The Washington Post

On July Fourth, many Americans get a warm glow from the famous assertion by Thomas Jefferson that “all men are created equal.” And rightly so; in the setting of British society in 1776, Jefferson was proposing a radical new political theory. But stopping there obscures how much work remains to be done. The works of three of the country’s finest writers — Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass — make that clear. They challenged Americans to rise above the evils of racism, sexism and homophobia.

All three writers were successors to the country’s founding generation. All three were journalists. All three helped formulate a sweeping new agenda for social justice; one that remains unfulfilled as we again prepare to celebrate America’s independence.

A revolution for rights: The American Revolution was a rights revolution proclaiming the end of the monarchy and hereditary aristocracy. The result (for propertied white males at least) would be a society whose upper ranks would be relatively broad and much less steep than the upper ranks of British society. But after the war, inequality persisted. Indentured servitude was widespread. Women and girls were still treated as appurtenances of males. And the population of enslaved people under chattel slavery remained subject to routine brutality.

In the next generation, between 1845 and 1855, a trio of activist journalists demanded nothing less than an end to sexism, homophobia and racism. They raised their voices to promote the idea that each individual matters, and that each individual has an equal right to self-determination. Fuller, Douglass and Whitman took republican democracy as a starting point and envisioned a “leveling up” from the bottom of society; no more enslaved people, no more second-class citizens. All are not identical, but all are equal in worth and dignity.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-making-our-celebration-about-all-rights-for-all/

[IngridsLittleAngel]

1. I wish we could

Unfortunately, we now live in a country where far too many people think rights are only for some... Some seem to think rights are a zero-sum game - to give rights to some people means "taking them away" from others. Of course, that is not how it works, but they sure think so. Therefore, "winning" on rights means they get rights and we get ours taken away.

246 years and it seems we have learned little. Or worse, forgotten more than we learned. Between the 2022 Year of QOP Hate, and the ECOTUS's rulings last month, it feels like we're going backwards, not forwards.

I'll admit it. I did not "celebrate" yesterday. I can't recall the last time I really celebrated the 4th. I just know it was hard to find anything to "celebrate" this year.