People take the Founding Fathers for granted.
It was a long time ago. The Constitution seems obvious nowadays. We take it for granted. Who’s read the Federalist papers? The Founding Fathers were slave owners. Who are the Founding Fathers? Et cetera, et cetera.
If you ever read any of the writings of the Founding Fathers, especially the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, you’ll see that aside from the philosophies and ideas they express, there’s a true passion.
This country was a labor of love to them. It was a project. It was truly an experiment. There was nothing like it, at this point in time, ever before in the history of humanity. What these men were trying to accomplish was to create the first place ever in the history of the world where freedom and liberty was codified and the rights of the people were protected by a list of rules that spelled out what the government was not allowed to do.
Imagine the passion Steve Jobs put into the first iPhone. Or Jeff Bezos’ vision for Amazon once it really took off and he saw how ubiquitous it could be in so many lives.
The Constitution was like that. Only without it, none of what Jobs, Bezos, or Henry Ford, or the thousands of other successful American entrepreneurs throughout history who affected countless lives would have been possible.
But that was a long time ago. We all grew up with the Constitution. It’s all we’ve ever known.
Perhaps we take it for granted now. Because we weren’t involved in it, we don’t feel invested. People rarely take things as seriously when they didn’t have a hand in it. Especially if you were just born into it, and it’s just the way things are.
And it’s not just American history that Americans are missing these days. It’s the history of the world before America. Prior to America, life on earth was largely a story of brutality, bondage, slavery, and tyranny. Slavery was all over the world prior to the United States, and people of all races, creeds, colors, and genders were the victims of it. Only America was the first to fight a civil war to end it.
America is just not that special to people anymore because much of the world is considered a generally safe and friendly place. We don’t truly appreciate the freedom and liberty built into our Constitution, nor that America is still the only place on earth with those conditions in writing. We barely even remember the last war we fought to preserve it. We’re just not invested.
Because we don’t have the perspective necessary to realize or understand what is truly at stake if we give up the freedom and liberty so many have fought to maintain, we spend our time with meaningless cultural icon worship or stirring up problems that simply don’t exist.
We don’t just need civics education to solve this. We need passion. We need to romance. We need to rekindle our romance with the United States that used to burn hot ‘n heavy. We need to understand that if we don’t start showing our love and affection for this greatest country on earth, it’ll up and leave. And we’ll be left with a socialist husk of what was the greatest country on earth.
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