This selection was included in tonight’s literature homework. It is too well-written and too true not to share!
We believe in the dignity of man and the worth and value of every living soul, no matter whether born in comfort or born in poverty, no matter to what stock he belongs, what creed he professes, what job he holds.
We believe that every man should have a free and equal chance to develop his own best abilities under a free system of government, where the people themselves choose those who are to rule them and where no one man can set himself up as a tyrant or oppress the many for the benefit of the few.
We believe that free speech, free assembly, free elections, free practice of religion are the cornerstones of such government. We believe that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America offer the best and most workable framework yet devised for such a government.
We believe in justice and law. We do not believe in curing an evil by substituting it for another and opposite evil. We are unalterably opposed to class hatred, race hatred, religious hatred, however manifested, by whomever instilled.
We believe that political freedom implies and acknowledges economic responsibility. We do not believe that any state is an admirable state that lets it people go hungry when they might be fed, ragged when they might be clothed, sick when they might be well, workless when they may have work. We believe that it is the duty of all of us, the whole people, working through our democratic system, to see that such conditions are remedied, whenever and wherever they exist in our country.
We believe that political freedom implies and acknowledges personal responsibility. We believe that we have a great and priceless heritage as a nation–not only a heritage of material resources but of liberties, dreams, ideals, ways of going forward. We believe it is our business, our right and inescapable duty to maintain and expand that heritage. We believe that such a heritage cannot be maintained by the lacklustre, the selfish, the bitterly partisan, or the amiably doubtful. We believe it is something bigger than party, bigger than our own small ambitions. We believe it is worth the sacrifice of ease, the long toil of years, the expense of our heart’s blood.
We know that our democratic system is not perfect. We know that it permits injustices and wrongs. But with our whole hearts we believe in its continuous power of self-remedy. That power is not a theory–it has been proven. Through the years, democracy has given people more freedom, less persecution and higher standard living than any other system we know. Under it, evils have been abolished, injustices remedied, old wounds healed, not by terror and revolution but by the slow revolution of consent in the minds of all the people. While we maintain democracy, we maintain the greatest power a people can possess–the power of gradual, efficient, and lawful change.
Most of all, we believe in democracy itself–in its past, its present, and its future–in democracy as a political system to live by–in democracy as the great hope in the minds of the free. We believe that it so deeply rooted in the earth of this country that neither assault from nor dissension from within can ever wipe it entirely from the earth. But, because it was established for us by the free-minded and daring,it is our duty now, in danger as in security, to uphold and sustain it with all that we have and are. We believe that its future shall and must be even greater than its past. And to the future– as to the past of our forebearers and the present of our hard-won freedom–we pledge all we have to give.
A Creed For Americans – Stephen Vincent Benét
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