Featured image by Céline Harrand. Follow the link for more of this artist’s work.
I would like to start by a quote from Elenore Roosevelt.
I am going to be small minded for a moment, but this leads to larger events, and then some even larger ideas. Elie Mystal, writer and commentator (and user of the Constitution) went on the view and proceeded to trash the Constitution. I am including the interview below…
Personal feelings aside about someone who calls the protections to his freedom of speech “trash,” let’s talk about some larger issues and ideas. Mystal refers to the character of the founders, calling them “colonizers,” “slavers,” “racists,” “mysoginists,” who never received “consent” from people of color and women about the rights to freedom of religion, speech, press, protest, petition, the right to keep and bear arms, the protection from illegal search and seizure, the protection of states rights, and so on and so on. Mystal thinks that the entirety of the Constitution should be thrown out, and in its place, a centralized federally dominant government defined by people, not land, no state’s rights for health care, elections, policing, and guns, claiming it to be “just better.”
I wonder if Mr. Mystal has ever done the thought process of Chesterton’s Fence. I personally don’t think so, but I will make a couple of points before I move on. The short of it is, “don’t tear down a fence until you find out why it’s there in the first place.” The modern reformer doesn’t see the reason behind the existence of some law or let’s just say… Constitution… and therefore wants to trash it and then build something in its place. I, being a second order thinker, would suggest that Mr. Mystal consider why the law… or Constitution was written in the first place. I would also encourage him to seriously and genuinely ponder the reasoning beyond the simple CRT talking points and pejoratives used to describe the Founders and Framers.
If we were to change to a national popular vote, based solely upon the population of the country, many states would lose nearly all representation. National decisions would be determined by a handful of cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. I don’t know about you, but have you seen the quality of life in these cities recently? It reminds me of a meme…
For Mr. Mystal, I think that he should seriously consider his own biases, and should attempt at the very least to understand why someone would need a gun, why someone should have local and state government control of elections, why there should be local police. He should understand why the Founders made the compromises they did during the fragile founding of the country, and the continuing necessity to understand the larger concepts of freedom and liberty that he believes should be stripped away and replaced with a tweet generated national document.
If Mr. Mystal considers the Constitution to be “trash,” then it is my belief that it is a treasure.
A Place 4Politics 