CONSTITUTIONAL CONVERSATIONS
Now Look at the Fine Mess You Got Us Into. . .
by
M. E. Boyd, Esq., “Miss Constitution”
Miss Constitution does not know what happened to the old Laurel and Hardy movies of the 1920’s, but Stan Laurel was always getting into trouble and it was Oliver Hardy’s job to “fix” it. After bonking a crying Stan on the head and flapping his short tie Ollie would come up with a solution worse than the problem. Always funny. The fine mess our society is into now is not so funny.
Miss Constitution thinks “the system”, as it has evolved, got us in this mess and it is the United States Constitution along with a few high-quality persons that can get us out of it. They key is not the Constitution alone but the existence and emergence of these high-quality individuals. We take for granted that these people exist any time our nation needs them. William Bradford was there in 1620; John Dickinson was there in 1787; Marian Anderson was there in 1939; George Patton was there in 1944; Martin Luther King, Jr. was there in 1965; who will be here for us in 2020? Virtuous persons usually, not always, emerge from virtuous and disciplined parents. Being famous is not the same as being high-quality. There have been times in the history of humanity where no one emerged. Let us hope God will bless our nation with the right person or persons doing the right thing in the right way to the right degree. (Aristotle’s notion of virtue.)
For the rest of us, and in case no right person or persons emerge, there are certain pre-requisites to “fixing it” that we might practice that can help immeasurably.
- We might practice not trying to guess what is in a person’s heart and then verbalizing that guess to others as fact. Media take note!
- We might practice giving others the benefit of the doubt just as we would hope they would give us the same.
- We might refrain from making flat-footed statements of un-proven fact, not qualified as opinion, that add fuel to the equivalent of the California wildfires.
We are encouraged by our society to do the opposite of these things. We are encouraged by almost all media, by almost all academia, by almost all politicians, to whip ourselves into a frenzy of moral certainty and false superiority. When you hear yourself say, while walking with a friend, “I’m not sure”, “I’m going to wait until the investigation is finished to form an opinion”, or “I have always admired this person – I’d like to know what her thinking is before I make up my mind”, you will know you are ready to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. The chaos we are experiencing is a warning of societal pathology. It is not a sign of healthy differences of opinion on how to move forward towards a more humane and just nation.
Our entire exceptional system is based on “progress toward a true respect for the individual.” (Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862.) This means respect for the individual of any community whether it be religious, or ethnic, or professional. We can note distinctions between groups, but personal judgment goes to the actions of an individual not to the community as a whole. We would sweep away, then, statements such as “the entire white community is implicitly racist” or “all the President’s supporters belong in the trash-heap of history” (Susan Rice’s latest statement) or “white police are targeting young black males for elimination.” These types of generalized statements need to be swept up and placed in drum-size bags for disposal.
We would begin “the fix” by focusing on the person and a person’s role in our Constitutional system. Respect for and Liberty of the person is the sole reason for our system in the first place. We state in the Preamble to our Constitution that we wish to secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity. The Declaration of Independence tells the world that to secure this personal Liberty we are instituting a government that protects it or we will abolish that government and form a new one that does. We are not talking about groups of people, factions of people, or collectives. We are talking about individuals. We hire public servants to maintain the rights of individuals, including their property, and to hold individuals accountable (not the group) for their behavior. If public servants think otherwise the People would do well to discharge them.
The logical next step is to ask what individual behaviors we need to see in our Constitutional Republic. We need to see voluntary compliance to the Rule of Law; we need to see knowledgeable citizens who are loyal to their nation; and we need to see responsible, savvy, common sensical citizens who can see through the fog of deception and refuse unworthy persons the power they crave. The system has evolved dangerously away from the individual and coalesced in a toxic brew of second-rate leadership, policies that hurt the very communities they were meant to help, bloated concepts of power, and the near extinction of varying ideas and solutions that we used to hail as the cornerstone of our exceptionalism. We are taught now to see differences of opinion and solution as moral failures in others if those opinions do not agree with our own.
It is a fine mess we have gotten ourselves into. Miss Constitution feels like bonking all on the head and flapping her pearls. Unlike Ollie, however, we cannot afford to make the problems worse with stale and misguided solutions. She is looking for the names of the high-quality people we need to “fix it.” Miss Constitution would start with Dr. Shelby Steele and Dr. Robert L. Woodson, Sr., and Erskine Bowles, among others.
Copyright©2020 by M.E. Boyd., Esq., “Miss Constitution”
APPLES OF GOLD – Voices from the past that Speak to us Now by M. E. Boyd is available at ww.amazon.com
@danproft #twill #tcot #leadright #maga #constitution
