We’re taught the Declaration declares independence from England, but it does so much more than that. It declares independence from the concept of a governing monarchy chosen by God to rule. It states that we are all created equal, we create governments, and any just powers the government holds, it holds with our consent.

Consent is an interesting word here. We know the person who wrote the document was a slaveholder, whose economic power came from people with no agency to withhold consent. We know he regularly had sex with one of those slaves who had no agency to refuse. The Declaration, as forward-thinking as it was, still envisioned a world where only a part of the population was governed. The rest was ruled.

Mr. Jefferson’s flaws make his document all the more powerful. The thesis of the Declaration is that no man has the Divine wisdom to rule us all. Any just power and authority in government must come from all of us and change with us when we finally see the errors of our past. When we understand that government must include all who were once ruled, be they freed slaves, women, or those who the Declaration later called “merciless Indian savages.”

Words from the past are like bugs trapped in amber, unable to change with the world around it. Jefferson’s document, preserved in amber, has all the DNA of our current government, and the aspirations for a government we’ve not yet been able to build.

To paraphrase biographer Joseph Ellis, his Declaration was wrong for the time but right for the ages.

You don’t need a Twitter account to read it. Go to Twitter, and put #survivorprivilege in the search window.

My privilege surrounds me like a castle. I cannot leave the castle, and, I cannot look back upon it. I cannot see it as others can. I imagine what it looks like, but everything is distorted when I look down from the walls.

There are people on the outside. People I love dearly. They can’t come in unless I dismantle the walls, and I can’t dismantle something I can’t understand. So, it’s my responsibility to listen and hear what is said about my castle.

I have been a part of several online discussions about sexism and misogamy since last Friday. Generally it breaks down to women saying “this thing is a thing,” and men saying “it can’t be THAT big of a thing.” It’s the difference between looking up the outside of a wall, and looking down the same wall. The wall looks a lot smaller from the top. From the top, it really does not look like that big a thing.

#yesallwomen and the Everyday Sexism Project gives us the opportunity to look at that castle in a safe environment. You don’t need to respond, just go over there and read. Don’t worry about defending yourself (or us), you don’t need to share your thoughts or have them evaluated, just read the experiences of others.