Independence for all of us
Happy Fourth of July, dear friends:
“A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.”
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The author of that paragraph was Thomas Jefferson, writing to a fellow member of the highly exclusive “former presidents” club, John Adams. The correspondence between these two men, which carried on for years once they put their bitter personal and political disputes behind them, is still widely read. Their conversation, after all, was written with an eye to posterity.
They also shared a macabre coincidence in dying on the same day, within hours of each other, on July 4, 1826 – the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Five years later, their fellow ex-president, James Monroe, also died on the 4th.
(Letter continued below)
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Two student-athletes from Las Cruces High School and Organ Mountain High were selected as Gatorade Players of the Year
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Just a few weeks ago, Las Cruces was the site of a Juneteenth celebration that was uniquely New Mexican in its tribute to the Blackdom settlement in Chaves County, and as I considered the alignment of Juneteenth (the final end to chattel slavery in the United States) with Independence Day I wondered what either man might have thought about emancipation and the examples of Black homesteaders directing their freedom to a pioneering life and the demands of destiny. It is a good story to remember on the anniversary of a document that declared universal human equality but, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated in 1963, stood as an unfulfilled promissory note: “…we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice,” he said in the “I have a dream” speech.
I reflect on the day as one of remembrance and aspiration but also of responsibility for how we got here and what we do, today, in service of greater solidarity and a better union. It’s a pivotal election year and there is a lot of shouting and tumult, but you and I can nevertheless resolve to uphold these remembrances in our decisions and our interactions with other people.
So happy Fourth, and please enjoy your Bulletin as it arrives today.
Algernon D’Ammassa
Managing Editor
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