Pursuing happiness
Independence Day could have been two days ago. But we celebrate it today.
John Adams thought July 2 should be celebrated. It was on July 2 that the Second Continental Congress passed a resolution on independence.
If all we were celebrating were independence from Britain, that would be the day to celebrate — or Sept. 3, the anniversary of the 1783 treaty in which George III recognized the new nation.
But we don’t celebrate July 2 or Sept. 3. We celebrate July 4 — the day the Declaration was signed. The day the nation’s creed was recorded and adopted.
Never before in human history had a new nation affirmed “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The first two rights are still revolutionary. The third is a mindbender. You have a “right,” dear neighbor, to pursue happiness.
It is an extraordinary phrase, and an extraordinary concept.
But to the 18th-century mind, happiness did not mean acquisition or indulgence. It meant virtue and distinction. So, with the right came duties — the duty to educate oneself, as Thomas Jefferson did so completely, and the duty to speak and to act, with purpose and integrity.
Every American citizen has this right and these duties, should he or she choose to exercise them.
The right to pursue happiness was, for the Founders, largely a matter of public enactment. There is satisfaction in public life, well lived and properly conducted. And unhappiness, for the Founders, was bound to derive from the misuse of our right and the neglect of our duties.