As with many past Fourths of July, I celebrated Independence Day by reading the Declaration of Independence. Corny? Maybe. But I find it reassuring and even edifying to re-read the actual words that led us to our independence. Not our freedom. Not a democracy. But merely liberation from what had, by 1776, become a foreign power.

And there’s the rub. The Declaration reads like a treatise from a people sick of the yoke of tyranny, but it is equally valid to say that the thirteen colonies and their colonists had evolved into a new nationality — “Americans” — that required a new nation. Independence was the only goal, freedom a promise to be fulfilled later. And 241 years later, we still struggle to fulfill that promise.

But in making that new nation for that new nationality, the Founding Fathers in that sweltering Philadelphia 241 years ago hit upon an idea never before publicly stated

Read the opening of the Declaration of Independence and there you will see — unsullied by time, humanity or history — our cause for celebration.

For stated there, in words artful and concise, is the simple, clear and unambiguous Idea which compelled us to became a nation. The very foundation stone upon which all else was to be built — both for us and the world.

Despite our sins as a nation, the United States of America remains the only nation truly founded on an idea.

The Declaration begins with the words “When in the course of human events” — what a masterly way to describe politics in all their complicated and convoluted details: human events. Not religions, not ideologies, not identities, but simple human events.

And that first sentence — and what a sentence, 71 words long! — holds a lesson long lost on American politicians: when you seek to do something which will affect others, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” compels you to explain your actions to the international community. Not a subservient respect, but a decent one.

Then come the 35 words which revolutionized the world — the words offered as the only explanation as to why the colonies dissolved the bonds which connected them to Britain and became a separate nation: “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.”

Again, the mastery and perhaps the only true genius of those flawed men in Philadelphia. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” There needs be, in fact can be, no discussion whatsoever as to the truth because it is as self-evident as land is dry and sea is wet. As self-evident as a sunrise, a rainbow, a thunderstorm.

No document in the previous 3,000 years or the subsequent 241 can match those 27 words as an artful and concise summary of human aspiration. No document can match it as a truth around which to organize our human events. No better ideal has ever been laid down for us to aspire to — or fail to achieve.

And the true genius of the Founders is that those combined 35 words have stood and can stand the test of changing times, laws, customs and “isms.”

The Declaration may say “men” but as times changed there is no one who does not understand “men” to mean Mankind, and thus Humankind. Some pundits try to sell the notion that the “pursuit of happiness” — my favorite part — originally meant “accumulation of property.” But as times changed, the definition of “happiness” has, too — but not the meaning of the words, the promise that its pursuit is a fundamental right.

Furthermore, it has been pointed out before that the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” means that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be taken away (alienated) by man, government nor even God, the creator who has endowed us with those rights.

But neither the writers nor the signers of the Declaration invented such ideas. They were the product of the Enlightenment, a decades-long evolutionary leap in consciousness when humanity tried to liberate itself from millennia of feudalism and absolute monarchies to place at the center of the universe not the king, but the citizen, the individuals beholden to no one but their fellows. And thus the singular notion that “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Declaration turned the world upside down: no longer did the Creator endow kings and queens, but only unalienable rights which belonged to sovereign citizens.

It was as radical a “discovery” in human events as proving the earth revolved around the sun, or was actually round. Those were also ideas that people were a long time accepting, and many simply tried to ignore or repress for decades or centuries.

And yes, even as the ink dried on the Declaration, even as the United States was in the moment of its birth, we began to fail to live up to that those principles, that ideal — that Idea.

But the words had been indelibly written, the idea born, and the world was a much better place for it.

So today and every July let us celebrate not the nation, the men nor women, not the deeds villainous nor heroic, but the words, the idea the United States has given to the world, It is the only gift we should celebrate.

Read also to learn anew that those words do offer a clear way forward, a map to where we all want to get. But also, a light, to find our way home when we are lost.

Joe Gannon, of Northampton, is a novelist and teacher who writes a monthly column. He can be reached at jgannonoped@gmail.com.

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