This Country’s Best Document Ever

By: Joe Mauricio

 

I should have written this article during the fourth of July celebration. Do you ever wonder how lucky we are to be an American, and to have the greatest document ever written—the AMERICAN CONSTITUTION?

America’s greatest contribution to world civilization has been in the art of establishing and preserving free republican government which, by now, we’ve had the longest practice on earth.

Our national regime has operated uninterrupted since 1789. During that time, France, a country that, like us, makes bold claims about having lofted high up the barrier of world library, has advanced from the First to its now Fifth Republic.

But the story of our Constitution cannot be told merely as an account of legal chapter. It must be told as story of human beings.

We know that the Framers did not derive their principles from the Constitution. It didn’t exist then. We possess a constitutional culture, a mosaic of doctrines, moods, sentiments, temperaments, and traditions.

We internalize the guarantees of the Constitution without bothering about its precise words. We see that the Constitution words are hollow without a culture that reveres them.

The Constitution, despite its political and spiritual dimensions, remains in other respects a statement of law. But I find that constitutional law, even in the hands of a lawyer is complex, but never an occult view. Lawyers get paid to think about the meaning of the Constitution, yet heaven help us if we are the only ones who do so.

Our constitutional adventure is marked by an astonishing continuity – the constitution binds us to the past—but also by a healthy measure of bumbling, accident, botchwork, and struggle. I think the forefathers believed there was no other way by which to resolve the constitution’s meaning.

It is worth remembering, as we reach back to our origins, that the day in July, 1776 when a few daring patriots agreed to affix their names to a scroll declaring America independent was a day of terror and loneliness.

Today, the fourth of July is a happy holiday of parades, fireworks, potato salads and apple pies. But to our rebel ancestors, it was a moment in which they braved the gallows of treason and exposed their children and villages to ruin and ever-present peril For as the Founders of this very unmythical nation understood, far better than us, no human creation, however finely wrought, is permanent.