Just a Piece of Paper

“I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.” Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison.

Washington could be foolhardy and ill-tempered. Adams could be vain, irritable, Jefferson evasive, at times duplicitous. And even in their day, many saw stunning hypocrisy in the cause of liberty being championed by slave masters. Historian David McCullough, Jefferson Lecturer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2003. 

Today is Constitution Day. That remarkable document was signed by its authors on this date in 1787, and sent on to the states to be ratified. There was no guarantee that they would do so.

It was a flawed document. It provided for the continuation of slavery, did not command the vote by women. It is maddeningly vague occasionally, written as it is in an English with which we are only marginally familiar. Although provisions for its amendment were written into it, the process was made so cumbersome that it is rarely successful.

Yet... Millions of men and women have raised their right hand to provide America with a blank check - "Up to and including my life" - and promised to support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Why?

Not because it is perfect, but because it gives us a uniquely American way to resolve the issues that face us. We are a fractious, bickering, petulant society. We can be selfish, lazy, opportunistic. Every human frailty, every pettiness and shortcoming resides here, jockeying for advantage under the law.

But, so does virtue, service and sacrifice. America is less a territory than it is an idea, that everyone has value, everyone has a right to raise their voice in how our affairs are conducted. Everyone has the right to arrange their lives as they see fit. Government exists to safeguard rights given by "their Creator," not to define them narrowly for its own purposes. It exists in its present form because this generation has accepted the gift bestowed upon us two centuries before we were born - the gift of a free self-government.

A man I met in a class several years ago said it in one sentence - "Anywhere I stand is the land of the free and the home of the brave."

Support, protect and defend. Happy Birthday.