Our noisy, hopping, living Constitution
Posted by Amphictyon | November 21, 2009 at 11:53AM CST
The silly mantra in Congress today, that our Constitution is a "living document", evokes a laundry room analogy. After 25 years with the same washer-dryer, a few months ago I bought my wife a front-loading set, with 15” high pedestals. But the very first time my dear bride used the washer and it started its spin cycle, it hopped all over the floor, sounding like a Bell JetRanger on takeoff. “Man,” I thought to myself “What a piece of junk! I thought I had found such a great deal with that eBay appliance warehouse…the front-loader is garbage!”
So I went to Google, entered search terms front-loading washer and spin cycle and vibration. I quickly found several gripe sites, discussing these terrible front-end-loaders. People describing in great detail how they reinforced their floor or installed special vibration pads sold at home improvement stores.
I quickly noticed that everyone posting gripes on the site was a man. I know from my own life that men are from Mars. We don’t read instructions; especially big yellow reinforced tags on the back of a machine, commanding us to remove shipping bolts that constrain the drum before using the machine. As a man, I don’t need instructions, especially if they look like a safety notice. I always throw out safety notices. They are an offense to my testosterone.
But when I finally found the yellow tag and read it, I turned the machine around to look at the back. I saw the four huge shipping bolts with their bright yellow washers. I removed them. Voila! The washer ran as quiet as a newborn mouse asleep in the nest…just as it was designed to do.
It’s the same situation with this proto-communist government takeover; this out-of-control, multi-trillion-dollar corruption in Washington D.C. that now feels like free-fall to Hell. We fail to recognize that this all began almost 150 years ago with Lincoln; went on steroids with Wilson and FDR. Obama, Pelosi, Reed, and Frank are not the first, just the ultimate, Chicago-style practicioners of unconstitutional government. And it isn't just Democrats; for years, most Republicans have been just as corrupt and untouchable.
The good news? The instructions are still right there on the machine; the Constitution still describes as fine a system of human government as has ever been attempted…if it will only be attempted. We needn’t scream at the top of our lungs at Congress, nor need we devise strange and complex work-around fixes for a machine that is hopping all over the laundry room…but has never been broken. We just need to read the instructions, and follow them; it’s all right there in the Constitution. AmericaAgain! is premised on the proposition that as soon as we begin enforcing it as James Madison said we should, we’ll see history's finest system of government running as intended – a marvel to the world.
