It’s Alive! The Declaration, the Constitution, Our Democracy — And You

It always breaks my heart to hear you say that the Constitution was not written for you, because there were people battling to include you from the very start — a battle that has persisted for countless generations, a battle demarcated through history with the mile-markers of lives given and sacrificed.

We know the names of the martyrs. Let us consider them as a whole, a constellation of glorious proportions, set about with stars like bright jewels — the lives that still define and inspire the writing, to this day, of a national story of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all human beings … a story we must live, embody, and make come true each and every day.

The fact that we constantly fail is only a goad to exceed ourselves.

Frederick Douglass, in his thunderous denunciation of American slavery on July 5, 1852, directs his earth-shaking prose at American hypocrisy — and in doing so defines himself a Constitutionalist of overwheming power and moral authority:

“Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America!”

Yes, of course there were people who battled for the opposite — to reduce your forebears to chattel. To degrade their descendants at every step and juncture of their beautiful free lives. This is obviously still going on. The people who wanted to ensure that the Constitution was, indeed, not written for you, are still among us.

Of course it’s messy. There is nothing on this Earth that is not messy. We are born in blood and tears and dissolve into soil and ruin, with a full measure of joy and woe between. You will find no spotless heroes, no flawless victories.

Does this cheapen or degrade the truth and beauty of the poetry, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? Or does it simply define and focus our moral aspiration and ethical demands, as individuals and as a society?

There is, for example, the Civil War. The first truly modern, industrial war (it saw the invention of one of the first WMDs, the Gatling gun), freighted with cynicism about Lincoln, and with shameful revisionism about the Southern legacy of slavery and atrocity as “heritage” — you can find all the mixed messages you want, the result was the decisive military defeat of an overt slave regime.

Should we be surprised more than a century later that the slave regime persists? That it has insinuated itself into are social structures and governmental institutions in the form of redlining, bureaucratic bigotry, Jim Crow … ? And today, that neofascistic “alt right” ideology is normalized by attention-chasing mass media and shameless demagogues?

Of course not. There is no surprise there. The persistence of such moral blight in our society should be obvious to any child, of any race and ethnicity, who’s being raised with even a shred of humanitarian awareness.

Abolitionism is as old as slavery. Born of it, perhaps, but born promptly upon slavery’s establishment, first in the heart of the enslaved, and second in the heart of the witness of conscience who chooses to act.

This struggle, this conflict, is ongoing. For human rights, it will always be a battle.

It was playing out fast and thick in the struggle over the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and it gave us all significant new terrain to stand on, by creating a flexible governing structures that can accommodate changing societies while still centering the essential human rights vision of democracy.

And, these documents gave us gorgeous, beautiful poetry that quite transcended the flawed, deeply mortal human men who wrote it.

The power of art, conscience, and rhetorical craft. What a legacy. What a gift to the future. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness!

The glory and beauty of this poetry is that it is alive and real and everyone owns the words.

If the Constitution was not written for you, then it is a dead document — a sheaf of dry rattling papers that must be strictly interpreted with the exactitude of the mortician’s autopsy.

You know this “school” of thought. The campus is the graveyard, set about with poplar trees, hanging with strange, rotting fruit, and a grand marble necropolis at the center — home to the lich necromancers working ceaselessly to bring about an ideological zombie apocalypse.

Forgive the Gothic excesses of my metaphor — but we must not concede any ground to the Constitutional gravediggers.

Not. One. Square. Inch.

These documents are as flawed as the men that wrote them, and the systems that produced those men. But the ideas, the poetry, and the humanistic vision — these exceed the limitations of the drafters and the framers, serve as constant goads and admonishments to them and us.

Giving up on those documents is exactly what the Constitutional gravediggers want us to do.

Because in truth, and they know it, the Declaration is an archetype for resistance and revolution in the name of all human rights.

Because in truth, and they know it, the Constitution is a living document, a poetic wellspring and legal template for humanitarian governance in a secular democracy — make no mistake!

And so far, it has been subject to glorious resurrections despite repeated attempts at emasculation and murder.

People fought and died — and still are fighting and dying — to ensure that these documents were and are written for you, me, and all of us.

Happy Independence Day — if we can keep it.