Happy 250th Birthday, We the People! How do you like your country now?
Taking stock of what the society our Constitution gave birth to has grown up to be over two-and-a-half centuries reveals both painful struggle and joyful advancement in the search for that “more perfect union.” In human growth parlance, it’s like the personal road we all walk from birth to becoming a fully integrated individual.
So, are we there yet? Or has the search ended here in the following excerpts from a popular writer on the Substack publishing platform, Oliver Kornetzke? Have a read and decide for yourself if this is your America asleep in a nightmare between sea and shining sea.
“250 years. Two hundred and fifty years of the most powerful, most resourced, most theoretically capable nation in the history of human civilization and here is what we have to show for it.
“Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.
“Two hundred and fifty years of that. And to celebrate, we built a wrestling arena on the White House lawn.
“Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single thing that addresses a single item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With … a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and, in some cases, died trying.
“Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.
“We built a culture where a football coach makes forty times what a physics professor makes and then express genuine bewilderment at the outcomes. Where children know every statistic of every player on their favorite sport team and cannot locate their own country on a map. Where the school that wins the state championship gets a parade and the school that produces a Nobel laureate gets a budget cut.
“Where scientific consensus on vaccines, climate, evolution, and basic nutrition gets weighed against a Facebook post and the Facebook post wins at the dinner table.
“We chose the bomber over the teacher. The tank over the clinic. The aircraft carrier over the water treatment plant. We spend more on military than the next ten countries combined, including our allies, while veterans sleep on the streets of the cities they came back to.
“We built the most expensive killing apparatus in human history and then told the nurse she made too much money. We built bases in a hundred and fifty countries and could not build enough affordable housing in fifty states.
“We chose entertainment over education so many times and for so long and at every available level of society that we forgot there was a distinction worth making. Spectacle over substance, performance over policy, the aesthetics of greatness in place of the actual thing, and the feeling of winning instead of asking what was being won and who was paying for it and what it would cost the people who came next.
“Rome had bread and circuses. We Americans have food stamps and a wrestling ring outside the Oval Office.
“250 years. This is what we built. This is what we chose. This is what we are celebrating.”
Reading Kornetzke’s troubling words led to wondering who “we” are. It seems We the People dropped the “We” when the stranger among us stopped being welcomed as part of the American fabric and “we” became “us-and- them.” Or maybe it started way back when we didn’t absorb and honor the people from whom we took the country in the first place.
Common interpretation of the 1787 Constitution allows that “We the People” in the Preamble referred to free, white, male property owners, only. Period. In that respect, Kornetzke has placed blame correctly.
However, we did get further down the road toward a more perfect union by means of amendments. By the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, everyone except Indians had birthright citizenship and the right to vote. Native Americans were considered sovereign nations with their own laws, and only became citizens allowed to vote via the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
So here we are. We The People, united on paper in a nation not choosing God but touting money that says we trust Him, one nation horribly divided and corrupted by greed and voter suppression, offering justice and liberty to a select few, pledging allegiance to the flag but not to the real republic for which it stands. We did this. We chose this.
In the lifespan of nations, America is like a teenager who had a promising upbringing but got in with a bad crowd and started abusing itself. It’s time for some tough love, if love there is. Fight for it.
CD White