Your Soul Food for the Post 4th of July Weekend 2026: The Way Home and “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”

Happy Soul Food Friday

This week:

Reflections on our 250^th birthday

“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.”

– Declaration of Independence

The Way Home by Kurt C:

There is a deep well of grief underneath us

Covered over by our daily tasks of existence

Of making the coffee

Washing the dishes

Checking email

Walking the dog

And

It has been growing with each act of hatred, cruelty, injustice

If we allow ourselves to go there, we can become lost, overwhelmed by emotion

And so, we seal it off, cover it over, pretend it is not there

How are the kids?

What book are you reading?

Hey, did you see that World Cup Game?

And yet if we drop from head to heart

Access the consciousness below the ego

Sink into the deeper layers

It is there

And without effort it fills us with tears

Not tears of sadness or regret or hurt or injury

Tears of compassion

Tears that are the essence of our humanity

Tears of disbelief that we could have fallen so far

That all the promise we held so close to our hearts could be washed away

And yet our salvation lies in this well of grief in the tears

In the release that swimming in these dark waters grants us

to connect once again to what makes us humankind – human and kind

And makes possible the small kindnesses

You know

The shared smile

The hand that helps

Making eye contact in the elevator

They are the foundation of our journey home

“Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”- Colin Powell

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American July 3, 2026:

And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “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.”

For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.

America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.

What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish were locked into a lower status than white Americans. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”

“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually women.

But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.

The men who endorsed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle.

Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Words to live by in 2026.

On America’s 250th Birthday, Celebrate Liberty:
Most Americans still appreciate the freedom the country was founded upon. Nearly half of Americans don’t understand what we’re celebrating for America’s 250th anniversary, according to a new poll. Clearly, the festivities aren’t about the quality of the country’s public schools since this year marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Something else we should be celebrating, though, is this country’s continued legacy of individual liberty.

Poll shows 46% don’t know why we’re celebrating America 250

The Great American Betrayal:
After 250 years, many Americans are disillusioned with their country due to its broken political and legal systems, declining faith, and tech-driven echo chambers that amplify fear and division.

America’s 250th year: A nation in disillusionment