“You are going to determine whether the American Revolution is to be preserved and perpetuated. In facing this responsibility you will be shaping the world to come. You will be determining the character of the society your own children will inherit. Today, we Americans are rediscovering some of the basic elements of our revolution. We are also waking up to the realization that mere talk about that revolution is no substitute for action. It’s not enough to be a son or daughter of the American revolution. We must be parents, you must be parents, propagators of American revolutionary doctrine.”
Our Quote of the Week is a call for us to embody the values behind the American Revolution—protecting every human being’s basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and demanding that our leaders govern justly.
This week, we find Sargent Shriver giving a commencement address at Springfield College. The year is 1963, and Shriver is Director of a very successful Peace Corps. He begins his remarks with this call to protect the values of the American Revolution, adding:
“The people of [other] countries want the same objectives we have pursued for 200 years: Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness, the Consent of the Governed, the Right of the People. It was no accident that President Sukarno of Indonesia opened the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian people in 1955 with these words: ‘We are meeting on the 180th anniversary of the ride of Paul Revere. The American revolution is the spiritual ancestor of our own revolution.’ These ambitions of former colonial peoples offer an unprecedented opportunity to America--and to your generation in particular. [...] as an associate of Mahatma Ghandi said to me in India: ‘Yours was the first successful revolution for the common men in modern times. Your Peace Corps must touch the idealism of America and bring that to us! Can you do it?’”
Throughout his life, Sargent Shriver acknowledged that the US had never fully achieved its aspiration to ensure basic rights and dignity for all human beings, but he pushed himself and those around him to create a society that would do just that. Today, we must heed Shriver’s call to defend the values behind the revolution that brought the US into existence. Every day, we are reminded that we cannot take our rights and freedoms for granted. As civil rights, human rights, rights to privacy, religious liberty, and free speech come under attack, we must defend them with courage and clarity of mind.
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