US History

Let’s Read the Declaration of Independence Together

Posted on by David Rodeback

Sometimes, when we seek the sense and meaning of an important text, it helps to read it aloud, or to hear it read aloud while we read the text. In case it’s useful to you, here I am, reading the Declaration of Independence on Independence Day 2023. I’m not a trained voice actor, as you will see.

At least I have the sense to keep reading, resisting the considerable temptation to stop and comment. So the audio file isn’t hours long; it’s less than ten minutes, including my reading of the signers’ names. (I figure they earned the attention.)

If you’d like to read along with me, here’s a link to the transcription I used at the National Archives.

Here’s the audio.

Photo credit: Dan Mall on Unsplash

David Rodeback - impeachment

Thanks for reading!

As of July 2024, the Freedom Habit has moved to Substack. New posts appear at freedomhabit.substack.com/. Subscribe there for free to get each new post in your e-mail.

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David Rodeback fiction collections - Poor As I Am and The Dad Who Stayed

September 11: Today We Remember

Posted on by David Rodeback

Today, twenty years after September 11, 2001, we remember.

(Next week, sometime, we should talk.)

For me the most striking, most inspiring memories involve the brave men and women who ran toward the danger, helping tens of thousands of others escape it. On that subject City Journal republished this fine twenty-year-old essay by Victor Davis Hanson: “What Made Them Do Their Duty?“

After you read it, if you still want more, here’s some of what I wrote about September 11, eight years later.

Independence Day, a Sunday

Posted on by David Rodeback

This year, the United States’ Independence Day falls on a Sunday, my Sabbath. (I realize it’s not everyone’s Sabbath.) The Sabbath has long seemed to me ideal for “the heav’n-rescued land” to “praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.” Those are Francis Scott Key’s words, penned in a time when it was not clear that a relatively new nation would survive the British Empire’s latest efforts to reclaim it.

Independence Day: A Day for Gratitude

I’ve been thinking – about this day – that gratitude is a gentle, humble virtue. It may seem too ordinary and small to stand against its rampaging, chest-thumping opposites. This is doubly so in a tumultuous time such as ours. By any other name we applaud and admire ingratitude and shower it with wealth. Its symbols and slogans adorn our lives, both physically and virtually. We call it by a host of trendy names which sound so modern, so enlightened, so revolutionary. I’ll leave it for you to think of names that might fit here.

I think I know the full list of ugly vices some would ascribe to me (if I ever caught their notice) for saying this in AD 2021, but I feel a deep and enduring gratitude to Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Wythe, and many others. This includes thousands whose names I never heard or read. This embraces both those who fought literal and political battles and those who loved, awaited, and sustained them from afar. I feel the same profound gratitude to God for all of these.

Silver Linings and Points of Light

Posted on by David Rodeback

I share many Americans’ gloom in the present political moment. My conservative concerns are legion. But I see points of light in the night sky. I see silver linings to the dark clouds, suggesting the light still burns beyond them.

To be sure, I don’t always write cheerfully.

  • Four posts ago I wrote about not giving ourselves permission to hate people. Hatred is as dark as darkness gets.
  • Three posts ago I wrote about social media censorship and possible measures against it — for a future day when we may have a government which isn’t in bed with Big Tech.
  • Two posts ago I wrote about the rush to reimpeachment and its motives. My thoughts were not sweetness and light.
  • Last time I described a dark and detailed dream about freedom, truth, and their enemies’ raging lust for power. I’ll let you decide, when you read it, whether you think it was really just a dream.

In one or two of those sober posts, and in private conversations with several readers, in person and online, I promised happy thoughts to come — because there are some.

I have three potentially therapeutic things for you. (In some cases I may have to explain the cheering effect.) They are danger signs we don’t see yet, those happy thoughts I promised, and things to do.

Constitution Day: A Big Deal

Posted on by David Rodeback

US ConstitutionHappy Constitution Day!

228 years ago today, the 1787 Constitutional Convention finished its work and formally sent its proposed Constitution of the United States of America to the states for ratification. It was a pivotal day (and then some) for the United States, but also for the world.

Granted, the Founders each brought large, vigorous bundles of competing interests to the convention. Granted, they were imperfect on many levels, as mortals tend to be. Granted, some of them owned slaves, and the rest of them were (just barely) willing to defer that problem as the price of having a functioning government at all. Granted — and inevitably — their work was imperfect, incomplete. That’s why they established a mechanism for amending it. But their compromise of compromises was the best they could do under the circumstances. It was the best we have ever done. They gave us a flawed, tempestuous republic which survives to this day.

One More Habit: Remember (and Something to Begin It)

Posted on by David Rodeback

I pondered and refined my list of Freedom Habits for about two years before building this site and rolling it live. (I did so off and on, not continuously.) It’s a good list. And two months hadn’t passed before I realized that I had missed at least one: Remember.

That thought struck on Veterans Day. And it stuck, too. So I’ve added a habit to the site, with links, its own page, and so forth.

Let’s start by remembering my fellow Cornellian, Dawn Seymour. Fifty years before I showed up in Ithaca for graduate school, she received her undergraduate degree there, stayed to work as an instructor . . . and soon declared that she wanted to learn to fly.

Which she did – and she married a pilot along the way. She flew B-17s on daily training missions for a year and a half during World War II.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think her 1,100 fellow WASPs — including the 38 who lost their lives — deserve to have the rest of us remember.

Read Dawn Seymour’s story here.

Come to think of it, all of this is appropriate to Pearl Harbor Day too, which is today. But you remembered that, didn’t you?

Recommended Small, Daily Doses

Posted on by David Rodeback

Books

Many books make sense, more or less, if you read them in small pieces, day after day. Some don’t. Here are some books that are particularly well suited to brief, daily reading.

Audio

A valuable companion to Reagan, In His Own Hand is Reagan in His Own Voice, which features audio recordings of dozens of his radio spots, with some commentary for context. This lives on my iPod and brings back memories of many early mornings in my youth.

(Links here are to my Amazon store. Purchases support this site.)

Do you have favorite daily doses?