That, I think, is where democracy begins — not in declarations, but in the quiet certainty that something in us already knows the difference between cruelty and care.

Yours faithful patriot,
Silence Dowell

So tonight I ask you to sit with a simpler question:
What do you know without needing to be told?
What truth rises in you unbidden, uncredentialled, self-evident?

Perhaps equality, compassion, and freedom are not inventions but recollections, things we remember about being human when we are brave enough to look inward.

The finding happens earlier, in the quiet, when the noise of persuasion dies down. To call a truth “self-evident” is to claim that it glows without being lit — that even stripped of scripture, party, or proof, it still hums with recognition.

Truths like that are rarely unlearned, but rather, tuck away inside you to travel beside you for all of your remaining days. We mistake knowledge for truth sometimes — as if facts alone could steady a world. But education is how we argue truth, not how we find it.

Not all truth requires schooling. A child knows when something is unfair. A body knows when it is unsafe. A heart knows when it is unseen. No one had to lecture you in those recognitions; they arrived like a memory, settling down somewhere inside your soul.

The founders named a few, all are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, but then spent the next few centuries proving they didn’t mean it. Still, the line endures because it gestures toward something older than politics: the idea that some things are known before they are taught.