Every year our family and many of our friends are everlastingly grateful to those citizens of Malibu who individually, or sometimes collectively, chip in to bring out the barges and put on a massive fireworks show. It doesn’t come cheap and we should all be very appreciative. This year there are four barges at four different locations and they’re all listed on the front page of The Malibu Times. So start your engines and light up your grills.
I sometimes wonder how the founders would feel if they came to America 200-plus years later, and actually saw their creation in action. Would they be surprised, delighted or appalled?
That probably would depend on whom you asked and at what stage of their life they were when you asked them.
Would they be surprised at the acrimony and division of the body politic in today’s America? I doubt it. They said some very nasty things to and about each other that inflicted deep wounds.
Adams and Jefferson had a very bitter disagreement and stopped speaking to each other for years. Finally, toward the end of their lives, they formed part of the original committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Nor were the first ladies immune to vitriol.
They went after Andrew Jackson’s wife, and Lincoln’s wife later, and several other Presidential wives. Sometimes their children also. I’m always bemused when our Supreme Court waxes eloquent on what founders intended, and original intent is what counts in interpreting our Constitution. To my mind that’s all utter and unmitigated nonsense. Most of the founders were bright, well-educated and affluent white men, who could barely agree on where to go to lunch, let alone what due process of law might have meant. Only latter day justices seemed to possess the ability to peer into Jefferson or Hamilton’s or Madison’s brains, and tell us what they meant in the deepest recesses of their minds.
How about the deals they made to get it all started? Would they think it was worth it?
Clearly a number of them saw, some for a variety of different reasons, that slavery could someday be the undoing of the new nation. So, abolitionists and anti-slavery groups bit their lips and took out everything about slavery because if they hadn’t done it, the entire deal was a non-starter. They were right, and for the next 200-plus years we fought wars, internal revolutions and dissension over slavery and its aftermath.
It’s this term alone the Supreme Court was still grappling with the remnants of the slavery issues, except now it’s in the form of voting rights.
Then there was major compromise in the battle between small states and big states. If it was just one Congress, with one house, the big states with big populations, like Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, would swallow up all the little states, again a deal-breaker.
So, they created two houses, and every state got two senators. Today with a population of 310 million, compared to a colonial population of near 3 million that compromise still stands, but would they be happy with the result? Today, 250 million or so Americans reside in 25 states and are represented by 50 Senators. The remaining 50 million plus Americans reside in the other 25 states and they also have 50 Senators. Is that disparity good or bad, and how would the founders feel about it? I guess that would depend if the founders lived in California or Wyoming.
Those founders all understood the need to bear arms. How could they not? They had just fought a revolution against the world’s preeminent military power and won due in no small measure to the fact that they all had arms. What often started out as a few thousand outmanned Continental soldiers saw their ranks double and triple when all the local militias grabbed their muskets and joined up with them. But how those founders would feel about AR-15 with 40 shot clips available to the entire population? I have absolutely no idea, nor I suspect did a majority of the Supreme Court that read the tea leaves on that one also.
Many founders knew what it was like to have their houses searched, their papers seized, be imprisoned without bail, taxed without consent, and to be tried in a royal kangaroo court without counsel, and all in the name of national security, or I guess they called it monarchy security. They didn’t want that and there are several provisions to try and prevent that kind of tyranny. Again, I can’t guess how they would feel about the Patriot Act, or military courts, or the government reading our mail or emails or Twitter feeds, or whatever is coming down the pipe next.
I can’t help but feel that if they were around today, they’d look a their handiwork, and the fact that we’re still here, and we go to the polls, government changes and no one has to call out the Army, or conduct massive arrests, or suspend habeas corpus. And although we don’t always like each other, or what the founders did, they did a damn good job, and their product has lasted a long time.
P.S. Please forgive the squeezing of the Declaration and Constitution together.