We the People...

Inspired by David Plotz’s Blogging the Bible series on Slate, I thought it would be interesting to see what happens when a person goes back and re-reads (or reads for the first time) other foundational documents of the civilization in which we live. I could have tackled the New Testament, but I’d already read pretty much all of it for a great class called “Birth of the Christian Tradition” and Paul tends to make me a little-heavy handed with the snarkiness (and I have the margin notes to prove it). Not to mention that I figured it was a task better left to an actual Christian, since I wasn’t actually raised on the Bible.

But I was raised with the Constitution. The first time I actually read the Constitution and could understand it I was 16 and in AP US History. Which is also the last time I took a class in American History. Yes, it had been in the back of every American History textbook I’d ever had, but no one had ever made us read more than the preamble. But, after the AP exam was over, as we prepped for the US History and Government Regents Exam (thanks New York!), our teacher thought it would be good for us to be familiar with the contents of this revered document. So she assigned us the task of mind-mapping each of the articles. And it worked, at least enough to give me an appreciation of the elegance of the document and some idea of how it was structured.

But then, for Constitution Day in 2007, I thought, “hey, it’s been a while since I read it, so I’ll retype the Constitution in my blog in honor of the day.” Which I did. It took hours. The Constitution is a lot longer than I remember it being, a lot longer than it looks in those fancy cases at the National Archives. When I told my best friend that I’d typed the whole thing, he asked “couldn’t you just have copied and pasted it?” Which, of course, I could have, and ctrl-C, ctrl-V certainly would have been a lot fewer keystrokes. But I wouldn’t have read the whole thing, and since I am sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, I figured it would be good for me to know what it actually says, especially in a time where it would seem that certain members of the administration prefer that I not.

Reading the Constitution gives one an appreciation of the hard work done by those fabulous gentlemen back in the day (I have a bit of a collective crush on the Founding Fathers). The attention to detail is remarkable, as is their willingness to accept that the country and thus, the document, wouldn’t stay the same forever. There’s stuff in there you never learned in civics class.

So, for the next few months, I'll be reading part of the Constitution every week and responding to it here. It starts with the Preamble today, May 14, the day the Framers met in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, and ends September 17, now celebrated as Constitution Day. To read the Constitution yourself, the full text is available via the National Archives (where you can also see it live and person).

The Preamble

This is the part we all learn in school. "We the People" and all that jazz. In fact, it's actually a beautiful statement:

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

That's a great way to start a document. Who's writing it, and why. What is it. And what hope those men in that hot Philadelphia summer had for the future! Justice, peace, liberty, for everyone, down the generations. The foundational rules of a government, written down by the people from whom that government derives its power. The Constitution wasn't handed down on a mountain, it wasn't revealed in visions, it wasn't handed down by the ruling classes. Well, ok, on that last one, it kinda was. The men who wrote our Constitution weren't average Joes, but they were creating a document that would rule even the most ambitious of them, rather than declaring themselves to be a new noble class. Which, considering that it was 1787 and no one had ever done this before, was pretty darn impressive.

And don't forget that this wasn't our first constitution. The Articles of Confederation hadn't succeeded in making one nation out of many states, since the weak central government had had little power. So now we were trying again, and this time, all that hard work brought forth something that lasted well into a future that those great men could never have imagined, both for good and for ill.