One evening I found myself reading words written nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, yet they felt as if they were speaking directly into our time. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I stopped there, my eyes resting on one word—pursuit. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit of it. That word carries meaning we seem to have forgotten. To pursue something means to work for it, to risk failure, to accept responsibility for your choices, good or bad. It means sacrifice. Our founders understood this. Happiness was never meant to be handed to us by government. It was something earned through effort, discipline, and perseverance.
As I thought about the world around me, it became clear that the idea of pursuit has slowly been erased. Many people today believe it is the government’s job to give them whatever makes them happy. They’ve been taught this way of thinking by leaders and by media that reward outrage and entitlement. When they are unhappy, they don’t look at their own choices. They demand. They protest. They rebel. They expect others to sacrifice so they can be comfortable. Laws are ignored. The rights of others are dismissed. The loudest voices claim moral authority without accepting moral responsibility.
Later in the Declaration, Jefferson wrote that governments exist to secure our rights, and that they only hold power because the people allow it. He also wrote that when a government becomes destructive to those rights, it is the people’s right to change or remove it. That sentence no longer feels like distant history. Our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are being stripped away, not all at once, but piece by piece. The pursuit of happiness has been twisted into a promise of happiness without effort, without accountability, and without sacrifice.
Our forefathers lived differently. They worked hard, endured hardship, and put their families and communities before themselves. They didn’t demand comfort. They built it. They understood that freedom costs something and that someone always pays the price. Somewhere along the way, we became so focused on collecting possessions and chasing pleasure that we lost sight of what it takes to defend true freedom and to seek the good of all people, not just ourselves.
We still have a choice. We still have the means. We still have the power. But power unused is power lost. If we continue to trade responsibility for entitlement and sacrifice for convenience, then freedom will not be taken from us—it will be surrendered. A nation does not fall in a moment; it erodes when its people forget who they are and what they are willing to stand for.
This is not a warning meant to divide, but a call to awaken. Freedom survives only when ordinary people choose to pursue it, protect it, and pass it on. If we fail to do that now, then history will not ask what our government did to us. It will ask what we were willing—or unwilling—to do to keep America free.