The flag was still there. And so are we Americans in the United States. We are a radical, radical people. It’s no wonder the world often says, Oh, Ach, Ay! Those Americans. We were not founded on fluffy words, but on blood-drenched ones.

Dont forget: We are still here, not by luck, but by hard-won “luck” in a mysterious land that often has wide margins for error, a self-healing fabric often, open wounds that still require medicine, and millions of hearts and hands and backs that still bend to try to bring to fruition the original vision of this North American Nation… which is actually a union of 50 nations with numerous sovereign nations of Native Americans within it.

That nearly 100 nations can survive each other, row the ships more or less together, even though sometimes in circles, it is an amazing miracle, a 233 year long event of possibilities, downfalls, upraising from the ruins, and unleashing incredible creativity and heartfulness anew.

So thus then…
For wherever needed in this wide world where people have to spend a month’s earnings on rice for one week, where self-appointed kings knife each other out in order to be ‘the only one,’ where elections are subverted, where just writers, humorists, teachers and holy people are tortured and imprisoned, where children have no chance to know the world or means of escape…… let these 233 year old words be a prayer for continuance, for ‘we the people’ of our nation and all other nations to continue to rise and rise and rise anywhere the score is Despot Shirts 62% vs The People Shirtless, Foodless, Powerless, Zero

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…

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.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established
should not be changed for light and transient causes;
and accordingly all experience hath shewn,
that mankind are more disposed to suffer,
while evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the forms
to which they are accustomed.

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