The following 4th of July message is from Master Sergeant John Ubaldi, a United States Marine Reservist who served in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Ubaldi is a founding board member of Move America Forward.

On Tuesday, Americans across the nation will celebrate the 230th birthday of the United States of America. Everyone will be enjoying picnics, backyard barbeques, and the traditional fireworks display viewed throughout the country. Today, the armed forces of this republic are engaged in the monumental undertaking that determines if the democratic experiment begun on July 4th, 1776 will begin to sprout in the turbulent lands of the Middle East.

It’s easy to forget the noble undertaking begun so long ago, easy to forget the auspicious beginning that gave hope to a world that a government can be ruled by its citizens. President George Washington warned Americans that they had a new responsibility when he stated in his first inaugural address, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

From the birth of this Republic, the foundation of this country was the proposition that all men are created equal. As President Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address, “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.”

Abraham Lincoln envisioned that the guiding principles of the Declaration of Independence and the rights conveyed in the United States Constitution would be the foundation that humanity rests on, eloquently written in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” It’s instructive that many of our brave military men & women understand they are serving the cause of freedom enumerated in that cherished document, sacrificing and establishing the basic foundation of democracy in the unstable often volatile region of the Middle East...

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