This week San Jose welcomed the U.S. men’s soccer team. The players arrived at downtown’s Marriott hotel on Monday, two days before their match against Bosnia and Herzegovina at Santa Clara.
There are many reasons to be excited about America at the quarter-millennium mark, and also causes for concern.
The document signed this week 250 years ago enumerated the grievances against the King, who had been “obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners.” Sound familiar? This week the Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitution’s principle of birthright citizenship in a rare rebuke to their appointer.
“He has made our judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and amount of their salaries,” Thomas Jefferson wrote.
His observation doesn’t seem dated as all. As does his rebuke of the King for “refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations” or “for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.”
Not to mention “he has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow subjects.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote that. Words worth revisiting and thinking about 25 decades later.
Our Fourth of July holiday commemorates our inalienable rights and to guarantees of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
We are not about crowns and gilded offices or spending hundreds of millions on ballrooms while working people in the wealthiest part of the nation line up outside of food distribution centers to make ends meet.
This issue contains a guide to local celebrations. And celebrate we should. The principles we reaffirm have stood the test of time and will in the end carry the day. —Dan Pulcrano, editor
