Here ye, here ye.
Several local residents will celebrate 10 years of reading the Declaration of Independence at nine Leelanau County post offices at Friday 10 a.m.
Omena resident Rink Smith has been reading this nation’s founding document from the steps of the Omena post office for the past 12 years.
“I enjoy reading it for myself, and I feel like I’m back in the late 1700s, just getting off the horse,” Smith said. “The declaration is the reason for the Fourth of July and a part of our American Heritage.”
Friday at 10 a.m., Smith will be at the Omena Post Office. Simultaneously, the Declaration will be read at post offices in Northport, Suttons Bay, Leland, Lake Leelanau, Cedar, Glen Arbor, Northport, and Empire.
“We the People are given unalienable rights … that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Declaration of Independence states.
Rink started the tradition after reading the back page of the Leelanau Enterprise in 2014 and was amazed by how amazing the document was, having not read it since college.
Smith appreciates the level of grammatical precision and symbolic language that is used throughout the document.
“I hung a notice in the morning at the post office that I would be reading it for the Fourth of July. There were two friends and family that showed up that first year. They did appreciate it, and that was the first year. The second year, we had a little more fanfare with a dozen or 20. Then, Jim Anderson came along, and now all post offices have a reading of the Declaration of Independence,” Smith said.
Rink would love nothing more than to show the Declaration of Independence to younger Americans.
“It’s great to get young people on board and on the founding document and light an American fire under their rumps,” Rink said. “People need to realize how important the document is and susync, purposeful. The constitution is more of a mouth full of words and bullet points of why we got established.”
Smith always recommends showing a video of Paul Harvey regarding the Declaration of Independence online.
Smith relates the Declaration of Independence in terms that are relevant today.
“Modifying the definition of consanguinity to focus on our common ancestry of American values as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, I submit that our extreme polarization could be mitigated if we would all revisit and rehearse this 249-year-old document,” Smith said.
