How do we define the United States of America? We call it a country, but that just means a plot of land with established borders. Land certainly tells stories, but those tales are woven over millennia, and definitions within that context just don’t scale down for the convenience of our human time-frame.
The first quote I think of in regards to the makeup of our government is that it is formed…
…of the people, by the people, and for the people…
Sounds familiar, right? Well, it’s not from the US Constitution. The quote comes from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the idea had been discussed by others for centuries. That might disappoint you, if you didn’t know that until now, but we do have an actual Constitution. If you need a refresher, here’s the subject of today’s Shallow Thoughts, the Preamble:
See if you can find the correction in the Preamble. Surprisingly, there are lots of corrections in the Constitution, which raises a question. If this was accepted as the final draft for the establishment of an entire country, how many punctuation errors are there, say, in the 2nd Amendment?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.
You see, Lincoln’s sentiment is squishy and unclear. It’s nice, but it is not a ratified legal document. Just because the president says it, doesn’t make it law, or even true. It’s an aspirational concept. The Preamble, on the other hand, is a lucid, if flowery, 10,000 ft. outline of the idea behind America. At the time the definition of “people” was limited to white folk, but that’s the thing about weasel language being used to establish important institutions. The words you choose could have an unintended outcome at some point in the future.
That point in time has been here since, at the very least, Reconstruction and “We the people” must now mean all humans. So-called “minorities” have been struggling for inclusion in the privileged caste since their feet first touched the shores of this ancient land, and while we’ve made progress over the course of a few hundred years, we keep getting dragged back by parties who are both inclined towards racial animosity and have amassed the resources necessary to control the direction of government. Those “resources” also include questionably warm bodies like almost the entire Republican party currently in office. Besides, much of the progress seen in minority populations is merely token, a bone if you will, to keep the boat from rocking too much.
Wading the shallows…
It might just be me, lord knows I never finished college (half a dozen times), but when your founding document starts with “We the people” and you use the formalized structure of organized society outlined in said document to exclude actual human people from deriving those benefits or achieving those aspirations while simultaneously granting favored whites free reign to commit crimes against minority bodies, that it specifically means we haven’t achieved the very first, most basic mandate of our Constitution in nearly 250 years?
Kinda feels like we’ve all been getting gaslit for the last 400 years.
Or maybe, just maybe*, we had a Civil War over the enslavement of human beings for purposes of building the nation we stole from the natives who had been establishing societies for thousands upon thousands of years where the slavers lost, but because of government flaccidity on the matter, didn’t bother actually enforcing equality for all those supposedly now free, new Americans and caved on States Rights, so that racist states could continue to oppress its citizens, but now with a veneer of sovereign legitimacy.
Who knew we’d develop such deep, violent rifts between races in a country where non-white humans have been chewed up and spat out, all to appease fragile white egos, but what do I know…
PS: YouTube is something of a cesspool. Despite this, I really love it. Well, I love the creators. Most of my content consumption is on YouTube, as I’ve found many, many creators who love what they do and put in the work. And yet, much of YouTube is filled with crap. Sure, it might be a nice place to keep your family videos of your meals and pets or terribly racist screeds and calls for race wars, but all the extra bandwidth, in storage, over the network, and in your hardware/software solutions, consume a constant flow of electricity to maintain.
PPS: Meanwhile, our Earth-bound resources, which have a limited lifespan, are being burnt to spin the turbines that delivers power to the infrastructure, systems, suppliers, and services that reliably energize global capitalism efforts, but is used as a tool of oppression for the terminally lower class minorities. Don’t pay your bill, you get cut off, so you have to work, but you can only take a job that pays minimum wage, which isn’t a living wage, so you need to take another job or two, just to keep the water and lights on and for trash to get picked up on occasion. Oh, and don’t forget rent…
PPPS: As the non-1% are dragged along with hypercapitalism’s reckless, futile desire to chase the mythological beast of unlimited growth, it seems we must make ourselves content with just waiting to see what happens. Maybe we should rewrite the Preamble:
We the selfish, recognized white People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union in our image, establish Justice for some, insure domestic Tranquility for the few, provide for the common defence of the powerful, promote the general Welfare of private business, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to just us and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America until we think it’s no longer worth maintaining and drop the pretense.
And if that’s what’s going to happen, then the death of planet Earth will come sooner, at least for us, than I think most of us would hope. The wealthy and their sycophants will just build themselves bunkers or whatnot so they’ll live, as will their descendants, and what do you think their parents are going to teach them about the world?
What, indeed.
* There’s no question that the Civil War happened due to disagreements over slavery. I’m just being sarcastic. The enslavement of human beings should never, ever be something that can be disagreed with. It’s criminal. Period.