My column for the San Francisco Chronicle on July 4

Not what I was hoping for this year.

After 249 years, where are we with the ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’ thing?

By Jack Ohman

July 4, 2025

The preamble to the Declaration of Independence is something most Americans had to memorize in grade school. This is the first sentence:

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.

Let’s see where we are with Sentence One, on this July 4, the 249^th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

Over the course of those 249 years this country has bumped along through a Civil War, two world wars, a great depression, several recessions and multiple struggles for civil rights.

There were also huge, undeniable triumphs.

We sent human beings to the moon, and dozens of spacecraft that explored the solar system.

We built grand global alliances that defeated fascism — and maintained them for 80 years.

We came close to mending many of the wounds caused by the Civil War through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. We made remarkable economic and social progress over decades of slow but steady effort.

The preamble notes that “all men are created equal”.

Tell that to any given oppressed group in the United States now. Are you trans? You’re not better off than you were just a year ago. You can’t even serve your country now, thanks to President Donald Trump, and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Trump and friends have made sure that any group that doesn’t happen to be white is excluded from our national story. No DEI. History isn’t being rewritten, it’s being erased.

Is the concept of liberty stronger today?

Not seeing a lot of liberty, particularly if you’re an individual seeking asylum in this country. No, you’re looking at a Supreme Court that has, with a small asterisk, put birthright citizenship itself at risk.

If the Trump administration so determines, you can be swept off the street by masked, unidentifiable federal agents, and, if they get their way, the U.S. military itself. Then you could be offshored to some detention facility in El Salvador or South Sudan.

If you disagree with the administration, or even ask hard questions, you can be publicly humiliated by your president of the United States on social media. Sometimes he uses language that is implicitly violent, igniting the craziest of his followers to kill fellow Americans in the middle of the night.

In 2019, Trump said “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

It's difficult not to see this as inflammatory rhetoric.

The president himself is at liberty to sell off the reputation of the United States to the highest bidder, using his own name as a brand to sell junk products, like watches, basketball shoes and even cologne. There’s even an online Trump store.

Is this country truly fulfilling its promise of the pursuit of happiness?

Well, you are at liberty to pursue Trump’s happiness. We already know what makes him happy: constant adulation, junk food and idiotic external stimulation. His bad childhood is being passed on to us.

Your happiness, as well as your physical well-being, is secondary.

The U.S. Senate just passed a piece of legislation that will cut funding for rural hospitals, nursing homes, and put you back to work in order to get Medicaid.

It will add $3.3 trillion dollars of debt and further enrich the 400 wealthiest families in the country.

At least Sen. Lisa Murkowski will get those Alaskan fishing trawlers covered, though.

Trump called the bill “beautiful.”

It is, if you’re a billionaire. If you’re not, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The last sentence of the preamble from the Declaration of Independence reads as follows:

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.

It’s rather clear that we’re riding a long train of abuses and usurpations now. Emoluments? Thpppt. Fourteenth Amendment? Meh. Systematic racism? Who cares? Intimidation of academic institutions and law firms? Whatevs. Random destructions of personal reputations? Yup. Science denial? The new normal is abnormal.

Is this “absolute despotism”?

I don’t wish to rain on your fireworks supply, but we are perilously close to that.

As we approach July 4, 2026, the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we will presumably have an election just a few months later.

Don’t think about egg prices this time.

Think about what America should be all about: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That’s a first sentence that we should continue to celebrate.

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Hey, YBs! : I was thrilled to also see this in print this morning (what a concept now, right?). Have a great day!—J.