All we have ever required of our fellow countrymen is to respect our Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness and, in turn, we have respected theirs.
Now our endowed Rights have been stolen by those especially entrusted for their protection.
Those who were created equal to us now think they have been elevated above us merely due to the office they have acquired solely through our good graces.
The Governments which have been instituted among us exclusively for the protection of our Rights, have become destructive of those very ends.
Our Safety and Happiness have been abused and usurped.
The principles upon which our Country was established are now distorted and derided, if they are remembered at all. As all of history shows, the pursuit of such a Government is designed to reduce us to absolute despotism.
Because we understand it is no light thing to alter, abolish or institute new Government, for far too long we have tried to content ourselves while evils were sufferable. But now there is no rule of law and our patience is viewed by our abusers only as consent to more abuse.
The call to arms underpinning both the original version and Wes’s renewal is an eternal principle, written in the blood of our fathers: 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, well, here we all are.
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