One sentence. It took the Founders a single sentence of fifty two words to define what this new country they were building should be, and by inference, what it should not be.
These new United States will be just, peaceful, well defended, kind in looking out for our neighbors and will seek to offer the future these same ideals and circumstances. Fifty two words, the foundation for all that followed for nearly two hundred fifty years, until January 20th, 2025.
In these intervening years we have, as a nation, grown corpulent with success, complacent about citizenship both at home and abroad, truculent in new tribalism and tolerant-even supportive-of behavior that is antithetical to everything those fifty two words represent. We have lost our way, again, as we did one hundred sixty five years ago during our last existential crisis; the Civil War. In many ways the issues haven't changed. It is still about money, power, racism, sexism and other-ism. All those pent-up grievances carefully stoked and handed down generation to generation waiting for a tinder spark to light the wildfire consuming us now.
America has never really come to terms with it's original sin. Most assign it to slavery-which was horrific-but miss the real culprit; unfettered mercantilism. With no practical restraints on commerce slavery was just doing business. The least effort for the best return. Familiar even today. It was only when the human rights abuse became so egregious and half the country was set against the other half that a war was fought. Not for states rights, the scant cover the Confederate States used as justification, but for sake of the Union. Even the Great Emancipator declared that if he could win the war without freeing the slaves he would do so. In the end the conflict was as much about the culture of profit as anything else.
The straits in which we now find ourselves are every bit as harrowing as the lead up to the Civil War, with significantly more dangerous circumstances; an Executive branch unbound from the restraints of the Constitution is exploiting a callow Supreme Court bent on its own methodical deconstruction of the wise, time honored principal of stare decisis. A President, freed from the constraints of a fearful Congress, not just willing-but anxious-to seek revenge on enemies he conjures in his fevered dreams. The strategy is simple, set the least among us against one another for the benefit of those with the most. Pay to play at the most rudimentary level. We are set upon a course of destroying the very fabric of the words that welded us together so long ago. Nothing short of Imperial coronation will suffice, even if he must tread upon the bloody corpses of those who defend the normal order of the law. The Apostolic warning from Paul, imprisoned in Rome, to Timothy rings true across millennia, 'we live in perilous times'.
We live in times where the phrase written on so many police cars, to protect and serve, have become cruelly ironic for all, as they have been for people of color forever. We live in a time when the very notion of being stopped by people acting under the color of authority to demand our papers was beyond the pale. An intrusion upon our right to be left alone not to be tolerated. Now communications channels are crowded with what to do when masked men with guns hijack you on a street, in a factory or school, or invade your home. We have become that which the Founders worked so diligently to prevent. We have lost the battle. We must not lose the war. Fifty two words. The rallying cry for America.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
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