We Wuz Framed

Two hundred eighteen years. That's how long ago the Constitution was written. It was completed September 17, 1787, Since that time, a lot of things have changed. Slaves were freed. All men were given the right to vote (even if it wasn't enforced). Women got the right to vote. There was abolition, and the repeal of abolition. Immigrants from Italy, Ireland, China, Japan, then Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, India, Russia, Greece...you get the idea. Our country has changed in two hundred eighteen years.

Yet time and again, when people challenge Constitutional ideas, they invariably ask "what did the framers originally intend", in the hopes that their englightened view should guide us even today. Look, I'm willing to believe that the framers were far more intelligent than current day politicians who have to worry about polls, and pundits, and reelections. Our country was likely founded by intellectuals, which is a far cry from today's politicians.

Even so, even if they were gifted with reason and wisdom, they lived in a different era, with different sensibilities. The framers accepted slavery. They accepted women as second class citizen. They really didn't even believe in democracy, fearing the uneducated would decide how the country would be run.

And there's one overriding fact about the framers that makes it challenging to use them as references to current day law. They're dead. This gives them a kind of immunity to modern day criticism, because we can impart any reasonable (and perhaps not so reasonable) interpretation of what they wanted, and hmm, by golly, it seems to resemble what we want.

If anything, we should seek the enlightened people of today, the intellectuals, rather than reduce arguments to mere party politics, where people mudsling, in the hopes of making some insult stick. Today's politics is sad, and mostly sad because the average American has little time to pay attention. I was told by someone Greek that the word idiot is really a Greek word, and means a man who is ignorant of politics. There is something to be said about that. Our ignorance allows politicians to spin their ideas until something resonates, while we take what we hear for granted.

Perhaps we would do better if the framers were still alive today, but they aren't, and the best we can hope for is that those who care, who really care about how the country can do better for itself, seek to do what is better, in whatever capacity they can, with a blind eye to those who've already made up their mind, or worse still, who've let others make up their minds for them.