Declaration Project

Editor’s note: On January 17, 2009, just three days before his first inauguration, President-elect Barack Obama called for “a new declaration of independence.” This isn’t the only time he’s harked back to the Declaration. ” In calling for the legalization of same sex marriages on June 4, 2013, he said, “It’s something that can be traced back to our Declaration of Independence — the fundamental principle that all of us are created equal. And as I said in my [2013] Inaugural Address, if we truly are created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.” And in in Audacity of Hope (after noting that his grandmother used to read the Declaration to him), he writes, “We hold these truths self evident….Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundation of our government but the substance of our creed.”  But this is the one and only occasion that Barack Obama calls for an altogether new Declaration.

Barack Obama’s Call for “a new declaration of independence” — Jan. 7, 2009, Baltimore, MD  [excerpted]

We are here today not simply to pay tribute to those patriots who founded our nation in Philadelphia or defended it in Baltimore, but to take up the cause for which they gave so much. The trials we face are very different now, but severe in their own right. Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast. An economy that is faltering. Two wars, one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely. A planet that is warming from our unsustainable dependence on oil.

And yet while our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not. What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that those first patriots displayed. What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives – from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry – an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.

That is the reason I launched my campaign for the presidency nearly two years ago. I did so in the belief that the most fundamental American ideal, that a better life is in store for all those willing to work for it, was slipping out of reach. That Washington was serving the interests of the few, not the many. And that our politics had grown too small for the scale of the challenges we faced.

But I also believed something else. I believed that our future is our choice, and that if we could just recognize ourselves in one another and bring everyone together – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, north, south, east and west, black, white, Latino, Asian, and Native American, gay and straight, disabled and not – then not only would we restore hope and opportunity in places that yearned for both, but maybe, just maybe, we might perfect our union in the process.

[Italics and bold ours]

Source:

Image source:

https://www.google.com/search?q=president+obama+independence+day+image+creative+commons&biw=1477&bih=752&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=BRWPVaLPOojs-QG24aK4Aw&ved=0CCwQsAQ&dpr=0.83#imgrc=noDu5RpbYI0LsM%3A

Further reading:

The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy, Nick Bromell, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.