A dream of magnificent proportions

“The framers of the Constitution may have been brilliant, but they weren’t perfect.

They lived in another age—lawyers, merchants, and gentleman farmers—amateur politicians all. For their time the concepts they introduced were radical, but they were not unrestrained. The preamble may have been orchestrated for “We the People” but the fine print kept the common fingers off the piano keys.

The founders were men of property, in an age when only men who owned property could vote. The concept of common suffrage, to say nothing of women voting, was alien to them, something they would have rebelled against as vigorously as they fought the British Empire.

Campaigning for election to office was an act of personal dishonor.

They could not conceive of their experiment falling into the hands of full-time politicians steered by armies of consultants, forming committees to suck millions in “donations” from those seeking favor from government; permanent officeholders who would wield the levers of power with the partisan ruthlessness of warlords.

A Congress routinely hijacking essential national legislation just to load it with amendments like tumors, hauling pork back to their districts to solidify their death grip on power—this would have been as alien to them as E.T.

When Lincoln sat in Congress for his single term, beginning in 1847, he considered himself lucky to have a desk with a drawer for his private papers and the privilege to borrow a book from time to time from the Library of Congress.

Only the insane of the eighteenth century could foresee that a bleak two lines added to the constitution a century after its creation, authorizing the collection of a federal income tax, could result in a seventy-year rampage by government to mentally rape its own citizens with millions of pages of totally unintelligible tax laws, rules regulations, and forms.

Today we have special federal tax courts because the law is so convoluted that ordinary federal judges are presumed too ignorant and unschooled to understand the complexities of laws and forms that every citizen down to the village janitor is required to understand, to obey, and to sign under penalty of perjury and threat of imprisonment.

Nor could it be possible in the age of reason to foresee a Social Security system that if run by a private business would result in their arrest, prosecution, and conviction for operating a Ponzi scheme. In the real world, taking invested funds in the form of Social Security taxes, paying current claims, and skimming the rest for other purposes is called embezzlement. When government does it, it is simply called politics. In either case the arithmetic is always the same. When the scheme goes belly-up, its operators, if they’re smart, will be in Brazil, or, in the case of Congress, retired, which is the political equivalent to being in Brazil.

With all of this, the people in what is touted as the greatest democracy on the planet have no effective recourse. They cannot act directly to fix any of the obvious open sores or seeping wounds in their own government, because the founders didn’t trust them with the only effective medicine, the power to amend their own Constitution. That is reserved for the serpent its creators never saw.

Short of revolution, something Jefferson urged take place at least every twenty years, the average citizen is left to pound sand by casting a largely empty vote to replace the devil-in-office with the devil-in-waiting and hope that the caustic nature of power to corrupt can somehow be neutralized.

Praying for the devil to grow a halo, we all prod on, one foot in front of the other, trusting that somehow we will not follow the Soviet Union over the national cliff.”

This is a powerful description of the Constitution of the United States of America. It was written by an attorney turned author, and is found in his latest work of fiction titled Shadow of Power, published 2008.

I share it because it certainly can be applied to almost any democracy. Government is far from perfect, and far from flawless. We have to have some faith that those we elected, some of them or hopefully most of them, will, in fact, do what is best for the majority of the people the majority of the time.

It is a good read and worth reading multiple times. It is dead-on, yet as most will understand, not resolvable. We all have to do the best with “what” we have and “who” we have. That is not to say that what we have cannot be improved. If I thought that was impossible, I would find a rock and climb under it.

The CNMI is such a small microcosm compared to the USA. Everything is magnified here. If you watch Fox News you will note that the same issues are being debated daily: The price of gas and the price of energy. The economy of the entire world is being dictated by the gyrating cost of fuel.

The people in the U.S. do not like what has happened to them any more than we do here. Fortunately, for them, they have more money and resources to throw at the problem. Fortunately, for us, it is a small geographic island. We do not have to drive very far to get to where we need to go, and the modest, mild temps are sustainable, most of the time, with limited power.

We all have to find alternative forms of energy so we are independent of those who would like to destroy the free world economically.

Hang tough! If only our leaders had/have the foresight to know where they are taking us and the repercussions of the journey!