At the Beginning ...

I generally don't do political posts here (as visitors to this site know), but yesterday I was thinking about the Preamble to the U. S. Constitution. Don't remember it exactly? Here it is ...

The Preamble

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Here the Framers laid out in exact (but also general) terms the reasons they had composed the Constitution. There are six goals:

1. "to form a more perfect Union"
2. "establish Justice"
3. "insure domestic Tranquility"
4. "provide for the common defence"
5. "promote the general welfare"
6. "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"

As I think about our deeply divided nation today, I realize that our nation has just about always been "deeply divided": Our Civil War was just the most violent manifestation of our divisions, but we have always separated ourselves by religion, ethnic and racial origin, gender, education, region, values--and on and on and on and on.

Also, our media have always been divided. If you look at newspapers from the earliest days of our country, you will see that political groups founded and supported their own papers, publications which often vilely distorted events--that ignored inconvenient facts--that emphasized vaguely relevant facts--that reported what their own "experts" had to say on key issues—that flat-out lied.

And today--with our ability to communicate immediately with just about anyone in the world--all of these problems are magnified to a degree unimaginable to our Founders (who also, of course, could not imagine such weapons as automatic rifles, could not foresee how women and minorities would one day vote--when my mother was born in Sept. 1919, women could not vote!--could not imagine so many other things that have become part of our daily lives). 

So we now have mass media who gather to their fires viewers and followers by the millions. And their principal technique to attract those folks? Distortions, lies, fear-mongering, etc.--a sort of we're-better-than-they-are mentality.

At times, to me, it all seems hopeless.

And yet ... those six goals are still in our Preamble. Our Founders personally violated most--or all--of them. And yet ...

We're still here (barely?) after more than 200 years. And some are still working hard to accomplish all six of those goals.

And some are working hard to destroy them.

Justice? A perfect union? Domestic tranquility?

Let's ask ourselves: How many of our elected (and appointed) officials--from the President, the Congress, the courts, and on down--are working to insure them? Or working to subvert them?

Our Founders believed (but did not, as I said, always practice their beliefs) that we should be a union, that we should be just and peaceful, that we should have a government that helps people ("promote the common welfare"), that we remain free--now, always.

As I look at those words in the Preamble, I think that, together, they represent hope. And hope, of course, is one of the greatest gifts we can confer. But it is a gift that requires unwrapping--and assembling. And maintenance.