These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this conclusion with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
—Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Philadelphia, February 14, 1776
The earth belongs . . . to the living: that the dead have neither power nor rights over it.
—Thomas Jefferson, a letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789
As I write this, the television is on and there with the President stand the current members of the House of Representatives, congratulating one another on passing a health care bill that eliminates health care.
Their self-satisfied smirks of satisfaction remind me of another news day when another President with a similar arrogant, unctuous smile swaggered across an aircraft carrier under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.”
I think back to that last day of the Convention in Philadelphia—September 17, 1787—when the Framers signed the Constitution. The mood—a mix of uncertainty and concern—was not as jubilant.
Wise men who knew only too well what they did not know were sharply aware that their Constitution was less than perfect. They were not so superior to believe that they had solved and settled, once and for all, the governing of a new nation. Their ambivalence can best be summed up by Benjamin Franklin’s less-than-enthusiastic endorsement: “I am not sure I shall never approve it [the Constitution] . . . I am not sure that it is not the best.”
They knew they had made mistakes: slavery, for one, troubled them, but not enough to end its perpetuation. And they never considered themselves soothsayers. They could not even predict political parties (only two years away) that one day would collect enough “factions” into a majority that controlled both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. A form of tyranny that would threaten the core of their political faith: a robust system of checks and balances.
But, then, how could they ever know that? For all their genius, they were—to state the obvious—very much men of their time: When black families were sold at auction. When men in debt were sent to prison. When children as young as seven were forced to work long hours in mills and factories. And when women had no rights under the law, either to vote or to own property.
All the more curious then that the Right-Wing syndicate turns to the Constitution as Holy Writ and the men who wrote it as infallible as the Apostles.
Jefferson had warned us of this when he wrote:
Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind . . . each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness . . . Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence [my emphasis] and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched.
Unfortunately, his words have fallen on deaf minds. And ironic, isn’t it, that the Framers who despised “hereditary succession” have now themselves become rulers—in absentia—of our own destiny?
Meanwhile, the Right—its Originalists, politicians, and pundits—continues its attack on the Constitution with a fierce evangelism that infects their every interpretation. The Constitution has become, in their hands, a weapon in the service of the self-righteous:
• When they read the First Amendment, they see their right to threaten journalists and late-night comedians. Their right to let corporations spend billions to further their own political ends. Their right for churches to contribute tax-free dollars to Republican candidates.
• When they read the Second Amendment, they see their right to sell guns to anyone with the bucks to buy them.
• When they read the Fifteenth Amendment, they see their right to disenfranchise blacks and Latinos.
This is America at its worst.
• • •
It’s time now to redeem the America the Founders wanted for us:
• A government that rules by reason, tempered with compassion and advanced by science;
• That guarantees free speech in the public square;
• That respects and grants liberties to all;
• That drives big money from politics;
• That separates church and state;
• That promotes sane and civil discourse;
• That protects the most vulnerable of its citizens;
• That ensures a society of the “haves” and the “haves”;
• That its elected officials share a civic virtue, disinterested in their own advancements;
• Whose criminal justice system is more “justice” than “criminal.”
It’s time for a new age of Enlightenment.
And speaking of Enlightenment—let me quote once again from Thomas Jefferson:
The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.
A curtain line if I ever heard one.