Thomas Jefferson & The Declaration of Independence

[@danadavis917]

I think we need to spend a little more time with the preamble... each and every word is precisely appointed, and yes, while it is somewhat plagiarized as derived of life, liberty, and "property," what its final edit actually represents is the most profound philosophical statement of all time. It is the very nature of philosophy to strip away the superfluous, to logically reduce the equation, in an effort to discover true, truths. In the entire realm of human emotion, the binaries, the dichotomies, of, for example, love versus hate, joy versus misery, etc., in final analysis every unhappiness is but a measure of our happiness. Happiness, and the continuous emotional pursuit of happiness, is the "One State" of all mankind. Life really is all about "life" (certainly), "liberty" - without which there can be no life or ability to pursue - and, "happiness." There is nothing else. Again, I would say, precisely appointed... as the product of many years - generations - of a colonial, literary, deduced logic... "All men are created equal," " endowed by their Creator" - he here speaks of the immediate infantile state, the entity that enters the world, and yet he never does reveal who that Creator is (see Jefferson's early life; the answer lies there, also his "Laws of Nature and Nature's God" - "Laws of Nature" have a long literary history; he here applies Puritan precept; and his "Nature's God" is but a personal evaluation ). "Unalienable": one could say that all of our idealism - and this is an idealistic vision - hinges on this one word, of, unalienable. I concur on the slavery issue as inserted time-bomb but I don't think it necessary to present this defense - the history of mankind is one of cyclical oppression; time will prove its validity. And those who would prefer to label it an artifact, to impart a hypercritical diminutive, will one day, once again, seek to resurrect it from the dustbin of our literary history (which has a colonial foundation). It's really an interesting document; each and every line of Jefferson's justification, although somewhat tedious, represents an actual event; even his choice of the word "impel" rather than compel, I think, is interesting.