The United States of America was founded on the recognition of a transcendent truth—that all human beings are endowed with inherent, unalienable human rights. No person can be separated from their humanity or their rights, and any authority that seeks to do so loses legitimacy.
The Constitution would turn this principle into a legal structure for self-government, stating the national mission to “establish Justice”, provide for “the general Welfare”, and secure the rights, freedom, and wellbeing of future generations. The Bill of Rights makes clear rights may not be infringed at the whim of the powerful, and power ultimately resides in the people.
Impeding immigration, making arbitrary arrests, disrupting the work of elected lawmakers, were treated in the Declaration of Independence as tyrannical crimes. The new republic would have no ruler, and the people would be sovereign. No person can be searched or seized, told what to think or how to worship, prevented from speaking freely or reporting facts, or forced to endure any form of cruelty; all of these are prohibited to those who hold office.
This is what hundreds of millions of people are celebrating, as we mark 250 years since the people’s representatives pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the defense of universal human rights. We celebrate this, in ways as diverse as the people and communities that make up the republic, and we are conscious of the fact that we not yet succeeded in fully honoring our founding purpose.
In the Civil War, and in the Second World War, millions of Americans deliberately sacrificed to defend universal rights, but their service happened alongside institutional efforts to segregate society and selectively recognize human rights and dignity. Police, firemen, teachers, and community charities, work to honor the national mission, but injustice persists, and some of those we entrust with public authority actively make it so.
Thomas Jefferson proposed treating human enslavement as a crime against humanity, declaring the evil system to be “a cruel war against human nature itself” and “an assemblage of horrors”. It was a moral statement aligned with the recognition of universal rights and an accusation of intentional sabotage aimed at morally and practically weakening civil society in the colonies.
The committee co-authoring the Declaration removed that section out of concern the colonies that allowed enslavement would turn against the Revolution. That decision would, in fact, weaken the new republic. Frederick Douglass would rightly observe, decades later, that the republic would be haunted by having justified or ignored the violent cruelty of enslavers.
To this day, we struggle to understand what it takes to honor universal human rights in practice as well as in principle. That failing means millions of people suffer senseless disparities and obstructions that undermine their freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing.
The republic is a work in progress, and the work is always beginning and beginning again. Today, we stand at the opening of a new quarter millennium in which we will strive to ensure that all human beings are treated as having inherent value and unalienable rights. Some of us will struggle against that progress, and it will be unlikely heroes—people unknown to history who work quietly, every day, to make our communities work in the forthright, just, and liberating way we want them to.
Today, after the parties of the 4th of July have passed, we should take up this work with intentional devotion to the founding principles and stated mission of the republic:
- Let’s work to ensure no human being is denied recognition of their inherent worth and unalienable rights.
- Let’s work to establish justice as the baseline for our time and for future generations.
- Let’s prevent disaster projected through planetary systems and conserve the irreplaceable ecology that makes Earth livable.
- Let’s remember that the obsessions of the most visible office holders are not more important or foundational than the local aspirations and dealings of people living and working in communities.
Honoring unalienable rights is an ongoing responsibility of all human beings. It is part of the structure and benefit of a free society that this duty is formally recognized in the roles played by citizens and by civil society generally.
We celebrate this shared task by adding Unalienable to our Nova York designs and to other projects. Let’s also celebrate this special authority of ordinary Americans by treating each other with decency as a core principle, regardless of ideology.
We make the moment; let’s make it good.
Salted Designs 