You Know, Thomas Jefferson Was Right: These Truths Really Are Self-Evident.

I don't do politics. Unless it's for effective public transportation, I tend to keep my mouth shut and just vote my conscience.

But the politics that have been going on in Iraq in the last two days must be commented on, and I've found some truly beautiful quotes:

"They promised to introduce democracy in Iraq, and I hope they can achieve it," Baghdad bookstore owner Abu Hussein said. "These values are not American, they are universal."

From the Dallas Morning News Editorial yesterday: "The choice could hardly have been clearer: democracy or religious fascism. Defying the killers, most Iraqis had the courage to choose democracy."

No matter where you stand on our involvement in the war, or our president's foreign policy, or the reality of how hard this will be to maintain, there is a certain beauty to 60% of the population turning out to vote under extreme circumstances.

It isn't a burst of patriotism or neo-American colonialism to me, but rather the reality that Thomas Jefferson (et al) said:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

These words really are beautiful. And correct. And just.

And it's beautiful to see that others, no matter the means at this point, see them as universal...and worth dying for to enact.

Sorry about the civics revival there...wait...

no I'm not.