The National Constitution Center, a place for citizens to learn and to engage with scholars on American history and constitutional law, is a quiet sunny island in an otherwise turbulent stream of contemporary life.
Clarity and Purpose
When all of us rise to a new day only to open a fire hose of information from our phones, home stations, and television, I turn a lot of that off now. I go to the library and check out David McCullough’s 1776, a gritty and personal record of the people and places, and gestalt of colonial America and 18th Century England. What were they thinking? These are the deep roots of our Constitution. We observe our heroes and heroines just as confused as we are in times of tumult and an uncertain future. It lends some comfort as well as reflection.
RX: Attend a Town Hall at the NCC
Click here to watch the Town Hall debates on relevant topics to the state of U.S. politics and how historians and Constitutional scholars understand short comings in our three branches of governance that are not meeing the needs of today’s Americans and why Originalism can trip us up.
David McCullough brings the Road to Revolution alive!
Lincoln is a figure that bulks very large in any thinking that we have about democracy, and especially in times that we live in now, times of anxiety, times of concern, fears of crisis. And at moments like this, we turn back to the figure of Abraham Lincoln, because there was a time of crisis in which he lived. And yet our democracy emerged victorious from that, in large measure because of his leadership and his wisdom. National Constitution Center, We the People podcast with historian Allen Guelzo
Readers of my blog will know that I frequently refer them to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for nonpartison perspectives and resources about our founders and founding documents. A key function of the NCC is inviting scholars from varying perspectives for a deep dive into critical issues of our body politic in which listerners and readers are referred back to key events and Americans that have kept us on the path of a living democracy. Our principle of consent by the governed is foundational to preserving democracy in our time.
In this discussion with Allen Guelzo, we return to Lincoln in the Civil War in which a nation based on laws and reason are his guiding stars.
Please share this post with friends or on social media. The discussion with Jeffrey Rosen and Allen Guelzo is relevant to our current political strife.
Below is an excerpt from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense which moved British subjects in America to make the final break with the monarchy under which they had lived for centuries, but in the clarity of air on the North American continent, chose to break the tie and create a democracy that inspired the world. See The National Constitution Center, Founding Documents Library.
But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.
As the 2024 march to the Presidential election advances, we are now in the midst of a movement toward kings and subjects if the MAGA Republicans win in 2024. Let the words of our founders – who had lived for generations under a system of monarchy – to ring in our ears and remind us of what is at stake in 2024!
This morning on National Public Radio Morning Edition, Ricardo Pires from UNICEF described the collapse of the education system in Gaza. Here is the whole segment.
No matter your thoughts about what must be done in Gaza or how the Israeli govenment must act in defending itself against the horrendous attack by HAMAS, the children’s needs are immediate and cannot wait. Food, medical care, safety — these are priorities. But, the fact that there are no longer school buildings for education, and there is no longer a safe place to learn — not even to be sent to neighboring countries due to walls that prevent them from going anywhere — further traumatizes children. Education is their future and their solace when the world they knew is shattered. How many of us have been saved emotionally and physically through education in which we keep building skills, understanding, and resilience? Even with chaos around us, if we can keep learning with our peers, we can sustain hope.
Are we now to tolerate the loss of a future for Gaza’s children?
This morning I wrote my own government about creating educational games and stories that could be included in aide packages along with food and medical supplies. It seems so little, even an afterthought, in light of how opposition to the Israeli Army’s ongoing assault must grow among us. It may even be happening as I know that UNICEF and SAVE THE CHILDREN consider education a key part of protecting children from trauma and mental stress.
All the oxygen sucked from the American public’s attention by the presumptive candidate for MAGA Repubicans and his sorry life and character are not an excuse to turn a blind eye to what is happening in Gaza.
University and high school students who grieve lawfully on behalf of Gazans are on the right path. We all must join them in a collective call to end the war.
Aldo Leopold Shack and Restored Prairie. Photo by Susan Feathers
The rights of individuals as written in the U.S. Constitution and a system of secular governance and freedom of religion are the principles at the heart of the American Republic.
Our European ancestors and writers of the Constitution had all lived under the tyranny of kings and queens and the Church, often in cahoots with an authoritarian government.
The Constitution was written to free individuals from those bonds to determine their own lives within a system of laws and justice. Protestant or Catholic, Jew or Muslim, atheist or agnostic, Calvanist or Puritan, Amish or Mennonite, and so on… each with the freedom to pursue their religious lives. The Bill of Rights freed citizens to determine for themselves how to live their lives. As long as a citizen’s choices did not infringe on another’s, they were free to pursue ideas and courses of action to develop happiness and meaning. Actions, property, social norms were subject to laws that protect individuals’ freedoms.
This is what is unique about American governance: at its core is the belief that all persons are created equal.
At the heart of the MAGA Republican movement is the rejection of this principle. All men are not equal and, America should be a Christian country.
UNDERSTAND THAT THE INTENT OF THE MAGA REPUBLICANS IS TO END THE FORM OF GOVERNANCE ESTABLISHED IN THE CONSTITUTION.
What are the actions promised by the candidate they support:
End all restrictions on oil and gas development;
Slash and Burn the institutions of the Republic and replace them with an authoriarian governing system;
Further suppress women’s reproductive rights including birth control;
Rid the government of environmental and climate change experts, departments and regulations associated with them. We are free to kill ourselves, our families, fellow human, plant and animal lives on planet Earth.
Support authoritarian leaders and governments. Putin and Russia, Kim Jong Un and North Korea; Viktor Orbán and Hungary; Xi Jingping and China. All enemies of democracy.
ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? THIS IS NOT A NORMAL ELECTION. THIS IS ABOUT THE LOSS OF OUR DEMOCRACY AND OUR WAY OF LIFE!
Listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson and historian Jeffrey Rosen interviewed by Ken Burns. Richardson published Democracy Awakening and Jeff Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness this year. They remind us what democracy is and how we always agreed about these principles among our political parties. We debated how those principles should be carried out and protected, generation after generation. This was the American Project. Now, one party intends to destroy these governing principle for an autocracy.
“I see a safe journey, I see a safe return.” ~ Kundun, 1997, about the 14th Dalai Lama. A Martin Scorsese film.
“Do not be distracted,” a Buddhist master says to the young Dalai Lama as he comes into the enlightenment. Well, friends and neighbors, I say this to the American public when discernment of the truth is critical among America’s voting public. We ARE the ones standing and acting at a dangerous turning point where how we vote, who we vote for will determine whether America holds together, as it was intended to be – a country of mutually crafted laws and norms, the rule of law and freedom to participate in governance and a free exchange of ideas.
Gnawing at the gates of Freedom are wolves, artful dodgers, hoodwinkers, and cowards. Don’t let them in!
“If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, its probably is a duck.”
Liberty Bell – oh ring, ring clear!
National Consitution Center in Philadelphia is a treasure trove of discussions that can help us stay clear on what our Founders established and how we strive to perfect and interpret it through each generation of Americans. Check it out!
“A reader lives a thousand lives before [s]he dies . . . The [hu]man who never reads lives only one.” ~ George R.R. Martin
Readers of this blog know that nature is a constant theme in my writing, reading and public work. We all have our roots plunged in soil we call home as did Lauren Groff, a magnificent writer who first found her inspiration at the family farm in New Hampshire.
Groff’s recent novels The Vaster Wilds and Matrix. pose profound questions about how religious and cultural practices have led to the depletion of nature’s resilience and how both men and women contribute to it when acting from an anthropocentric view. The journeys of discovery of both female protangonists is personal, imbued with hopes and dreams in the crucible of living their lives in times when women possess little social agency.
Groff is currently writing the third in the “triptych” of stories that carry the thread of inquiry and discovery. Readers are led to consider our present predicament of killing the very thing that gives us life: the living Earth.
Here are two excellent interviews that explore how Lauren Groff came to write each story, all the complex threads of thought, stories and influences that helped her conceive these outstanding novels.
The first interview explores The Vaster Wilds which takes place briefly in Jamestown colony in the “starving time”and mostly in the American wilds in 1609 North America.
The Matrix concerns Marie de France, the first published female poet in France, a poet and deep thinker whose writings are surprisingly free of social and religious strictures on women at a time of low female agency. Many sources contributed to the final story Groff tells. I found this instructive and supportive for writers of fiction.
This lecture from the University of Notre Dame is in my view the best exploration of how Matrix evolved and the exceptional thinking of one of America’s most brilliant writers of our time.
There is a music interlude to begin. Start of the Interview is 5 min. 23 sec
As a writer who shares the theme of nature I am so grateful to Lauren Groff for demonstrating the power of fiction to move us to understand the deep roots of our misunderstanding.
Get a cup of tea or java and prepare to listen to this insightful projection of how it happened. About 10 minutes.
From the great science fiction novelist and futurist, Kim Stanley Robinson, another salient message.
His recent book, The Ministry for the Future, rocked the world of people concerned about climate change. Why? Kim took on the gargantuan task of imagining how our country and the world community finally made the realization it could no longer live at odds with a living planet.
It is not a straight line by any means. But, Kim shows how the world came together to secure the biosphere from the vantage point of a person looking back to the terrible twenties from 2071.
This morning an article about Joe Biden’s record of climate legislation appeared in Distilled on Substack. Michael Thomas, the author, believes most Americans need to know how much Biden has accomplished on climate legislation to move the nation and the world toward a viable future.
Thomas compares Biden’s record to what we can expect from a T(Rump) presidency. From believing climate change is a “hoax” to promising to raze environmental regulation, Trump plans to disengage from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which he did when in office (2017 to 2021), and promises to “drill baby drill” to increase oil and gas production. That is reckless with the futures of millions of young Americans and all the countries in the world affected by rising temperatures and its consequences. No one can buy us out of the climate catastrophe that awaits foolish decision makers and the public.
If you care about your children’s future wellbeing, it is imperative that we keep climate innovation at the pace spurred by investment into companies and communities toward a clean energy future through Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Billions of investment dollars are spurring innovation and contributing to a strong economy–stronger than any other nation in the world. The future of clean energy is being laid down now, but it is in its infancy. Will we let a mad man disrupt that again?
Related: “Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) invested nearly $20 billion in promoting climate-smart systems such as advanced grazing management, manure composting, and soil health practices like cover cropping through the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) working lands programs. One of the issues under negotiation for the new Farm Bill is whether to keep these funds where they are – supporting and expanding climate smart conservation – or move some or all of the remaining funds into commodity programs where they will accelerate farmland consolidation and further disadvantage small to midscale farms. The 2024 Farm Bill must maintain or expand the IRA investment in helping farmers build climate resilience, sequester carbon, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and not raid conservation to support the outdated “get big or get out” agribusiness paradigm.” ~ VA Association for Biological Farming
Jeffrey Rosen, CEO and Executive Director of the National Constitution Center (NCC) and Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School is as enthusiastic a scholar of the American Constitution as any man. His respect and love of the principles embedded in the Constitution’s DNA is infectious.
The National Constitution Center brings together people of all ages and perspectives, across America and around the world, to learn about, debate, and celebrate the greatest vision of human freedom in history, the U.S. Constitution.
Here below are links to a podcast and a video on the Constitution Drafting Project in which three scholars – conservative, liberal, and libertarian – draft five new amendments to the Constitution.
Below is the YouTube video of the full discussion among these scholars. I was struck by the fact that in spite of different viewpoints, their five amendments were very similar which also came as a surprise to them. Their discussion provides citizens with understanding of how a broad range of viewpoints can converge on how to govern ourselves.
Susan Feathers 