Alfie

I must be a naive and ignorant person. I am not "with-it'. I learned some things long ago. They are irrelevant now.

I am told to teach these "things" now as if they are true. One of these "things" is the Constitution. I am not behind this document one hundred percent, but it does seem to be the basis for law in this land. My favorite part (other than some of the amendments) is the Preamble.

This forms the idea behind the making of the instrument. I have never been a person to take someone's word as golden unless I had some reason to back it up. The Preamble makes the Constitution readable (and possibly doable).

Here is my interpretation of this profane paragraph.

We the people in order to form a more perfect union.

We are a country of individuals who have tried to make government work as individuals, but have failed. We must work together and to this end we must do the following:

1. Establish Justice. Simple enough, fair rules punished consistently with consideration given for unique circumstances. Also, a need for an impartial settling of disputes. Also, the authority given by the people to the state to act upon behaviors which are harmful to people.

2. Insure Domestic Tranquility. Governments rule by consent and to ensure confidence they must adhere to maintaining an environment that is safe and where its citizens are free from tyranny and persecution. Safe at home, work and play.

3. Provide for the Common Defense. This is basically calling on the citizens to serve as a  bulwark organized by the national government so that any invasion upon the soil of the US would be thwarted with minimal loss of life. Defense is a word that speaks volumes about the nature of violence. DEFENSE...

4. Promote the General Welfare. A government must also provide for its less fortunate in their times of need. Today, we would also include education and health care as these will promote and bolster a citizen's sense of caring for all Americans. A truly free and noble nation is one in which there is concern and care for the weakest and the poorest so that they are clothed and fed at the minimum and a place to stay is provided until such time as they can once again contribute to the greater good.

5. Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity. By adhering to the above policies by providing a fair and equal footing for all citizens liberty is nourished. The enemy of liberty is uncontrolled power and unchecked authority. If the overly ambitious were left to regulate themselves without checks then liberty would soon be replaced by fear and greed and it would only be a matter of time until the Constitution itself would be worthless. No generation is allowed to mortgage the future for any reason without a means to repay their posterity.


So, in order to create this nation the individual states had to relinquish most of their sovereign power to a central authority to the national government. The states agreed that a federal system was truly a more perfect form of government than the previous one and wisely determined that the newly formed nation would require a centralized control of policy. This, my friends, was the apex of The Enlightenment.

An argument can be attempted by making a general sweeping view that The Enlightenment was a period of intellectual growth in science, politics, philosophy, music, art, literature, etc... such that for the first time the church, and to a lesser part, Royalty, was not a dominant part of a major social and intellectual movement. The people of The Enlightenment had liberated themselves from papal and royal authority and were answerable only to empirical truth in their questioning of the world around them.

Liberty was valued because of the inherent qualities of truth that freed people from the narrow minded dogmatic and despotic authority that had previously ruled their minds and bodies. The secular version of the world was born and despite the continuous assault on liberty by the modern day equivalents of the papacy (church) and aristocracy (corporations) it has endured. I stand in awe of just how extraordinary the makers of this nation were. I stand in utter contempt of the people who use fear and hatred to usurp our liberty in their hyper-ambition to consume more and more of everything as if the Earth was a giant game of monopoly and its inhabitants pawns to be used until sacrificed or destroyed just so that they may have more shiny beads than their neighbor.