Why We Celebrate

The Windrose Team would like to wish you a joyous Independence Day! Today we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. Brave patriots came together to declare the reasons they were compelled to create a new nation. In a time when our nation seems so divided at heart, let us embody the words of Dr. Adam Carrington, professor of Politics as Hillsdale College, and “be critics for renewal, not for destruction.”

As you spend quality time by the pool and around the BBQ with your families today, we encourage you to celebrate the land that we love, and the creed that has shaped it. The belief that all men are created equal should not just be an empty phrase, rather it is a lifestyle. It is a call to treat others with kindness and respect. We must understand the rights that God has given us and also recognize that others were created with the same natural rights. Every person was created with purpose, value, and inalienable rights that cannot be taken away or given away justly. So on this Independence Day, let’s find ways to build others up and to rejoice in our common heritage as Americans, no matter where we were born or what we look like.

Here are three principles for all Americans to unite around today:

  • We all are created equal in the image of God with inalienable natural rights.
  • The purpose of government is to protect our natural rights.
  • Governments are illegitimate if they unjustly violate the natural rights of their people.

Lastly, we challenge you to read aloud the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence today with your families. Record yourself and share it with the Windrose Family!

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

(You can find a Spanish version here.)

Happy Fourth of July!