Happy Birthday, America

I want to wish my country and its citizens a very happy birthday. Two hundred and thirty one years ago, some forward thinking individuals declared their independence from tyranny by signing a document whose words still resonate, even though they are sometimes either forgotten or ignored. While preparing for your picnics, softball games and fireworks displays, please take a moment to consider our founding fathers and their words of wisdom.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds 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 to 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 shown 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. (more. . .)

Please read those words carefully, even the ones past that preamble that many of us memorized in grade school.

I hope you all have a safe and enjoyable 4th of July and get a day’s worth of renewal before heading back to the exciting world of new possibilities and hope for prosperity and growth in nuclear energy production.