Thomas Jefferson, an 1805 portrait by Rembrandt Peale – Public Domain

“When in the Course of human events…” You remember those resounding words which are as memorable as “We the People…” The brothers who signed the USA’s founding document might have called it a “Manifesto.” After all, like many manifestos it expresses a political agenda. Instead, they called it “a Declaration,” and indeed they declared in about 1,300 words, most of them like “rights, “laws” and “Facts,” part of everyday conversations, and some high falutin words like “perfidy” and magnanimity.”

Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, a slave-owner and a wordsmith, drafted the Declaration of Independence apparently in isolation in a rented room in Philadelphia in June 1776. The Second Continental Congress adopted it on July Fourth which is why many of us on that day watch parades, wave the Stars and Stripes and feast on barbecue. Some citizens may even recall the Declaration of Independence.

Seven residents of the senior community where I live in San Francisco have been rehearsing for our performance of the Declaration. Several residents have observed how much it resonates today with the antics, the crimes and misdemeanors of the Trump administration. The founding brothers are turning in their graves. They’re surely applauding the “No King” demonstrations that have swept across the nation.

Ever since 1776, Americans have been declaring their independence from someone and or something, including the US itself. Huck Finn declares jhis independence at the end of the book in which he floats down the Mississippi with Jim and who aims to “light out for the territory.” The Confederacy declared its independence from the Union in 1861, determined to preserve forever the “peculiar institution” of slavery, which is not once by word mentioned in the US Declaration of Independence, nor is the word “revolution.”

The American revolutionaries didn’t draw undue attention to their revolutionary stance and didn’t identify as firebrands.........

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