This 4 minute video featuring Danielle Allen was published in The Atlantic on November 2nd, 2018.
If you get into the Community Rights movement it will not be long and you’ll hear this fundamental principle: Governments are instituted to protect the health, safety, and welfare of individuals and communities.
If they fail to do so it is our duty as citizens to alter or abolish the current form of government that is failing to protect us and our communities. And as is pointed out in this short and concise video the Declaration of Independence is a living document that we can lean on to understand the power relations between the different levels of government, much like Abraham Lincoln and Abolitionists did to end slavery in the United States. In fact, Lincoln would go on to say that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
We invite you to watch and listen to this deceptively simple video to gain a better understanding of the importance of the Declaration of Independence when it comes to our current political, economic, and environmental reality we face as citizens in 2019. You can watch and download the video HERE. — Curt Hubatch, Community Rights US Media Team Member
Brief description of the video: Few Americans are aware of the fact that the first printing of the Declaration of Independence contained a copy error. As a result, many subsequent republications of the text display the typo. In a new video filmed at the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival in June, Danielle Allen, a political theorist and professor at Harvard University, explains why this seemingly innocuous oversight can have grave consequences. Interpreting this sentence correctly, Allen argues, is crucial to understanding how the powers of government are organized—and, consequentially, how to be an effective civic agent.