The Constitution!

One of the things that we had to do in order to graduate from high school was to pass a test on the United States constitution. And, now, it would appear that same constitution is on trial and must pass a test of validity to an new age that is cast in a turmoil that would test any government’s ability to long survive.

It has always interested us to discover some of the documents that some of the worlds worst dictatorships have put together to try to cloak themselves in, in order to lay some basis for their otherwise bare naked existence. That existence has always been formulated around a ruthless grip on power, usually backed by an equally as ruthless apparatus including secret police and a large and powerful armed forces. Although we have not read it, the former Soviet Union was supposed to have had a very idealistic constitution. Although we have no idea what is to become of Egypt, they have recently adopted a new constitution of their own.

As an American citizen, we have always been taught that our own constitution is a “living document� that has the breath of life breathed into it by each new generation of citizens that come along. An adequate education is one of the great basis for a democracy like what the United States has had for the last 223 years since the constitution became the ultimate law of our land. In order to be civic, a people need to be educated in the ways of citizenship.

It has been said that sometimes, things become so complicated that they begin to break down the basis for any organism to long exist. Perhaps another way to say that might be to state that cancers come up in the body politic that even the greatest brain and intelligence cannot survive. Nothing that lives lasts forever and death is the way of life. To think that a nation the size and scope of the United States is going to last forever is probably not to think at all. When we look back through history, a good example of what happens to democracies might be what happened to Rome before the Empire. The great republic that formed the basis of Rome’s existence as formulated in its great senate only lasted a little over two hundred years before it became a dictatorship under the thumb of a Caesar. Perhaps the United States has started down that road with the invasion of Iraq by a man who might have liked to be a Caesar--George W. Bush! It is often said, in the animal world, that once a taste for blood begins, there is no way to end it except in death. The United States as it is formulated today, is the greatest military power that the world has ever seen and there are many in our society who want that dominance to continue and to expand even further as we confront supposed future foes like China. Our military-industrial complex is just as deadly today as anything that former president and conquering general of World War Two--Dwight David Eisenhower--warned against at the close of his administration back at the beginning of the 1960‘s.

It only takes one person and one experience to ruin what generations have worked and suffered and sacrificed to built up. And, we probably had that in the person of George W. Bush and those who surrounded him back in the last decade. On one of the morning talk shows that we watch, Joe Scarborough, a former conservative congressman, stated that one of the consequences of the just concluded fiscal cliff negotiations--the making permanent ninety eight percent of the Bush tax cuts-- had justified what George W. Bush had done and signed into law eleven years ago and that we should quit criticizing the former president for what he had done. This belies the fact that those same tax cuts had created, along with two unnecessary wars, that along with the lack of law and the resulting absence of oversight involved in deregulation , a deficit that this nation may have a very hard time overcoming. It is best remembered that just twelve years ago, our deficit was one fourth of what it is now and was being paid down with a string of balanced budgets!

Barack Obama might have had wonderful ambitions for the American people but, unfortunately, those ambitions are thwarted by the mess that George W. Bush and his rush toward a new American century of dominance left him. It cannot be stated often enough that the main purpose of any neoconservative presidency since Ronald Wilson Reagan’s in 1981 is to run up the national debt and, by doing so, starve the government of its ability to function in an effective manner. The current brouhaha over the Hurricane Sandy relief fund is a fine example of that belief system at work.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he took office in 1933, stated that if he were not successful in his endeavors to reinvigorate the American economy, he might be the last American president. The situation that we faced in late 2008 and early 2009 was every bit as serious as the one faced by Roosevelt in the last depression. When one looks at the level of debt compared to 1933, the situation was, indeed, far more dire! In the final analysis, it took a world wide war to bring the United States fully out of the last depression! And, to reiterate what we stated earlier, sometimes organisms get so complicated that they must inevitably perish from those complications! As we look at the world today, a great wash of debt across many of its great western civilizations threatens to bring down the whole thing. And, particularly in the United States, that debt has been assembled to a great degree by a group of thinkers who want the power and influence of this democracy to simply wilt and die. This group of people, living and dead, care not for the foundations of this society except as they pertain to increased military power and the ability to make and concentrate vast amounts of money and capital in the fewest possible hands! It is a greed that will bring down everything including the constitution that underpins the whole thing. We will probably always have the constitution in America so that he powers that be can pay lip service to it but the “living document� that has served us so well may have already passed away. When a concerted effort is made across several generations to destroy the common good using every thing at its disposal including an increasingly more ignorant and poorly educated population guided by a news media that has lost its way amidst a plethora of conflicting information and distribution channels, what has breathed life into this nation for so long is simply snuffed out amid all of the resulting confusion. The document and the hollow institutions are still there but the forward looking goodness of it all is simply gone.

We can blame the constitution for our troubles but it is dependant on each generation to keep its candle of freedom alight. That freedom includes a continuing generation that can see that its children are at least as well off as its predecessors have been. When a system of government and an economy can no longer provide for what is dearest to its citizens souls, it is destined for the scrapheap’s of history where, eventually, all such systems end up. And, just like the idle rich who have done nothing additional to add to the creations or developments that their forbearers gave them as a legacy, there is no appreciation for the struggles that have gone on to place them there so there is also no appreciation for the framework that allowed those struggles to take place. As Abraham Lincoln once stated at a ceremony where his only job was to raise the flag: I can raise it, but, it is the peoples job to keep it up! Or, as Barack Obama tried to tell us during the last presidential campaign when he said, perhaps inelegantly, that: You didn’t create that. Somebody else did that! And it is a mark of the slide that this nation has been in that those who have started a business are too dense to realize that generations who have gone before them set up the environment and the platform that allows so many of them some small measure of success and the very evidently large measure of conceit that goes with it.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.