'Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'
Wishing all our American shippers a Happy Fourth of July, I am reminded of the last part of FDR's 1941 State of the Union address:
'In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception--the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions--without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.'
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Annual Message to Congress, 1941)
The above affirmations are the necessary complement to a simple phrase that changed mankind forever. And helped shape a nation, while also bringing hope to millions across borders and throughout time:
'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.'
(The United States Declaration of Independence - July 4th, 1776)
Every single year I read those few paragraphs together and I am grateful that these words exist, that brave men chose to put them on paper. And that countless other brave women and men made them a part of their everyday lives. Relentlessly. Passionately. Definitively.
All the rest is politics, of course. Irrespective of how irritating or even worrying the current state of play might look, these extraordinary simple truths and their irresistible spirit will never be obliterated.
(Norman Rockwell - The Four Freedoms. Freedom of Speech, 1943)
