We The People - My Political Self

We, The People is the opening line of the Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787, and still holding us together 232 years later. Pretty amazing for an upstart country to form itself into a union under the circumstances that we did – fighting off the British and the French and oppressing the natives – and that we have managed to keep it alive so long without descending into anarchy or dictatorship is equally amazing.

Yet here we are in 2019 having a Constitutional crisis.

Why? Because, for starters, of lack of education. If every American citizen who gets educated in this country reads and studies the Constitution and knows what provisions are in it and its 27 Amendments, we would be more attuned to exactly what is required of us, and what we need to do to maintain a civil society and to maintain civil political discourse.

The fact is that although, over time, MORE education is needed, we are actually getting less. There are MORE things we need to know, yet the very technology that exists, that requires knowledge of its inner workings, is the same technology that is preventing us from getting the education we need to understand it. Take, for example, an 80″ OLED television. Everyone wants one, whether it fits your décor or not, but no one except the designers and manufacturers knows how it works, what goes into translating the electrical signals coursing through your co-axial cables into the vast array of colors and moving shapes constituted by individual pixels lighting up for mere fractions of a second. And the minute you sit down to watch that TV, you are neglecting the education you need to learn how to make one. And you are also neglecting the rest of the education you need to navigate safely on this planet. Talk about irony.

So, here we are, 232 years after the drafting of our Constitution, which, by the way, was written by people who hadn’t the disadvantages of 80″ OLED televisions to distract them from their studies, people who were intelligent, well-educated, hard-working, opinionated, but civil. The version we have is not the first. It was drafted and discussed and amended and edited and re-worked, but the people involved in this process were up to the task. And not only were they able to think through the necessary provisions of what they thought our Constitution should look like, they also had the advantage of being familiar with the history that had brought us to the point of needing such a document. History, my friends, is as important to our existence and survival as are the lower rungs of a ladder, but people don’t appreciate that now.

Now, as an example of both lack of education AND the importance of our Constitution, we look at the White House, bastion, we thought, of the most powerful person – in theory – in the world, the President of the United States (POTUS), However, the person who now uses the Oval Office on a daily basis knows NOTHING about the Constitution or its Amendments. He claims to be “a high IQ person,” even though he probably has no clue what the letters IQ mean, and he has been to many schools, but he has managed to escape from each without an adequate education. That has serious implications on a variety of fronts, not least of which, of course, is the actual governance of this nation; but, in addition, the state of our educational policy. No one who attends a school in this country should be able to graduate without having studied the Constitution, and perhaps, given the state of politics today, it should be a required semester course, but no one should be able to be elected to the presidency of this country without an adequate knowledge of the Constitution. Yet we have an ignoramus in the White House. How did this happen? How did we permit it to happen? I’m sure our founding fathers – intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin – are all turning in their graves, watching from above, perhaps, as the least qualified person ever pretends to be presidential, alienates us from all our international allies, and tears into the Constitution with a hatchet.

Thus far, in this “presidency,” the offenses against the Constitution have included violations of the Oath of Office, the Emoluments Clause, ignoring Congressional Subpoenas, Treason, to name but a few. To be fair, not all of the violations have been due to actual lack of knowledge of the Constitution; some are just the typical violations of your average con artist, plunderer, thief and liar. But perhaps some knowledge of the Constitution would at least have informed this venal heretic’s ability to govern. Or not. It seems that the “very stable genius” is incapable of learning anything at all, so Constitution or not, he will always be a failure at this.

In any event, the egregious violations of the “most venal one” and his aggregation of thieves, liars, bigots, villains, traitors and other ill-informed “decepticons” (boy, do I love that name! Thank you, Transformers!), are stretching our Constitutional powers to the max. How can we force them to submit to subpoenas when they have no concept of what a subpoena is? How can we force them to TELL THE TRUTH when their entire “administration” is built on lies? How can we make government work despite the despot? And this is where the Constitutional crisis exists. We need to answer these questions. We need to make sure these people follow the law, and when they don’t, we need to put them in jail.

Right now, dear readers, we are teetering on the brink.