CONSTITUTIONAL CONVERSATIONS
Reaping What Has Been Sown
by
M.E. Boyd, Esq., “Miss Constitution”
Miss Constitution has called, in the past, for a fourth Great Awakening in America as we have currently lost our way relative not only to a trust in God but in the very notion of being God-fearing, humble, and grateful as persons and as a People. The latter three qualities are essential elements of our social order. Many early settlers to America came as orphans swept up in the slums of London in the 17th and 18th centuries who became indentured servants for a period of years and, if they did not get extensions for misbehavior, were allowed to own their own small piece of land and “tame the wilderness”, so to speak. Their lives were hard and brutal but this ability to own one’s own land departed from the age-old notion of a feudal society. Quite a remarkable seismic shift in how societies organize. It began to dawn on those who survived in America at this time that religion is the bedrock upon which life must be lived to retain any sort of sense of proper ordering. Hence, the first Great Awakening of religious revival around 1730. Black America had its own Awakening in the development of black churches in the mid-19th century, specifically the African Methodist Episcopal Church, through Richard Allen. Yes, slavery did emerge in the 1630’s mostly with the planter class of the south. Agrarian wealth was achieved with rice, tobacco, then cotton. A small percentage of southerners owned slaves, but the institution was supported in the south and widely condemned in the north. Some blacks owned slaves. One of our earliest Founding documents, the Northwest Ordinance, banned slavery from new territories. The Constitution of 1787 did not. It was, however, doomed to die as slavery conflicts with the core principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution itself, and moral law. History, however, is now often taught as Exploiter and Exploited and leaves out the nuances so necessary to get a real feel for all those brought here without consent, white and black, who had to figure out what to do, not to mention those already here. It also often leaves out the real national effort to make the Founding principles and the partnership between the two communities an actual reality.
So, it was shocking the other night to see the former President of the United States, Barrack Obama, dressed in black, announce supportively that what is going on in our society today is the equivalent of a Great Awakening. Miss Constitution does not see what is going on as a return to God-fearing, humble, and grateful. What she sees is a loss of confidence in many white Americans regarding their civic and economic institutions and, as the famous black scholar Dr. Shelby Steele calls it, their “moral confidence.” What Miss Constitution sees is the attempt to put “a final nail in the coffin” of the American social order many in academia have spent a good part of sixty years trying to tear down. We are as beaten down as a society as many American parents who, loving their children dearly, thought they were raising honorable people. Many well-meaning parents paid attention to their children’s interests, tried to provide material comfort that they thought would elevate their chances for success, and sent them to what were once honorable institutions of higher learning. Then they turn on their televisions and see their once sweet, shy, willing-to-please child in the street, invectives spewing from her mouth, her clothes filthy, carrying ugly signs. These are some black parents. Some white parents see the same thing with the additional humiliation of seeing their child kneeling for forgiveness and other mortifications. It is heart-breaking but we are reaping what has been sown – race relations highjacked by a long-time battle to turn our Constitutional Republic into a socialist/Marxist state. It is a clever tactic to use what has some painful truth as a way of winning a global ideological battle that America’s version of capitalism had already won.
Miss Constitution considers what is going on a Revolution. We are reaping what has been carefully sown.
What has been sown are distortions of fact. What has been sown is convincing otherwise intelligent persons that what they are seeing with their own eyes they are not really seeing. What has been sown is that God is not central to our social order and that we are a secular society. We are not. What has been sown is that “normal” American citizens can trust their institutions as having their best interests at heart. What has been sown is that parents can send their precious children to public schools and institutions of higher education that have the same wish for their child as the parents do. What has been sown is that persons who are elected to office as servants of the People are really servants of the People and our Constitutional Republic. What has been sown are the seeds of self-loathing in one’s own person, in one’s own country, in the United States Constitution, in the ingenious but little understood statecraft and economic systems of the nation, in the heroes of both the black and white communities that we look to as guides on our journey to virtuous lives. The white community cannot fix this. Her attempts to “fix” in the past have only injured the strong and important black family so essential to our nation and to the hopes of the individuals in that community and to their children and their children’s children.
Ironically, the only fix must come from those in the black community who know better. It must come from the highest quality persons that the black community has always produced who watch in horror at what is taking place. Far from a Great Awakening it is a Great Desecration. The black community in America has always held back from the white community its greatest secret – it has never seen itself as inferior and has many aspects of the superior. The black community does not have the moral burden, so heavy to many whites, of past institutionalized slavery and racist laws. Within the stable social order our Founders created, and with the progress we have made (though not perfect), individual blacks have prospered and achieved. It would be tragic if our prosperity producing system is destroyed for everyone because that prosperity cannot exist without a stable social order and those who wish to destroy our country know this. We are reaping what has been sown. It is not that we are reaping what racism has sown we are reaping what inattention has sown. Miss Constitution will forever be calling for authentic education in philosophy, in economics, in history, and in civics and a true Great Awakening in our duty to God and each other. She is also praying that the spirit of Marian Anderson will emerge to save our most extraordinary nation, including its failings, and that we hear that once-in-a-thousand years voice singing My Country ‘Tis of Thee once more.
Copyright©2020 by M. E. Boyd “Miss Constitution”
