This is wise advice, and yet another opportunity to point out the wisdom of asking, and then following the directions. I’m talking about the writin’ on a toothpaste tube here, and not something of only minor import, such as assembling the kid’s swing set or a Saturn 4 booster rocket. If you leave off a few nuts and bolts or some bracing structure, it doesn’t matter when assembling a swing set or rocket booster, but if you don’t squeeze the toothpaste tube properly, and your spouse does, well heaven help you. More relationships have blown asunder over toothpaste tube squeezing than have ever failed just because a moon rocket faltered and fell smoking into the Bermuda Triangle, or when the swing set ended up wrapped around one of the heirs.
Far more controversy surrounds toothpaste tube squeezing than even leaving the toilet seat up or down, or even unrolling the toilet paper over the top or under the bottom (of the roll). Either of these two issues could once keep Ann Lander’s column busy for weeks at a time. But that half squeezed toothpaste tube setting next to the sink can drive a wedge between folks in a committed relationship much faster and deeper. All you need is one obsessive perfectionist who ritualistically squeezes the tube from the bottom, every single time with no cheating, and that slovenly, lazy, uncivilized cretin who comes along with his unwashed thumb and forefinger and just mashes the plump perfection of the top of the tube. Talk about your irreconcilable differences.
Which is why it is so important to read and follow these directions. And that is why I was so pleased to learn that the incoming class of representatives in the Congress, on their very first day, took a moment to read out loud the Constitution of the United States. Now maybe, for once in a very long time, they will follow the directions.
But I dream…
Maybe I shouldn’t expect so much from our elected representatives. The Constitution appears on first read to be pretty straightforward. Do this. Don’t do that. Create a government that can function without stomping on the little folks. And don’t repeat the mistakes of the governments that made all these people run away seeking freedom in the first place and then later fight a war in order to form this new country. The document is innovative and brilliant in its simplicity. But the weaknesses that turned those other governments into the oppressions they became are those same old familiar human weaknesses that wreck much of what we do. So I suppose no one should be surprised when humans screw up this work, too.
The directions are there, but they are often ignored or perverted, to suit the needs or wants of the selfish and powerful.
Consider the Bible, the Torah, the Koran. Talk about a collection of the directions. These are a bit more complicated than a toothpaste tube, but potentially useful, or harmful, depending upon whom is trying to follow, or subvert them. You would think the Word Of God would also be a work of innovation and simplicity, but then the humans get involved, and too many cooks…
The Koran was written when lopping off heads with a long curved sword was pretty much standard of practice. The Bible dates back even further, to a time long before color TV, much less 3G. And the Torah is even older. It has been in the public domain for so long the writers lost proprietary rights, and many of its wisdom has been copied into those newer directives. They all were written to show folks how to play out their lives with as few mistakes as possible. But some people think these old sets of directions have lost some relevancy over the years. The world has changed some. It’s 2011, and people do things differently, at least part of the time, than they did at the turn of year eleven. Heck, they didn’t even know it was year eleven when it was.
Ya might even forget your manners and blurt out that those folks involved in writing down and then later translating those three tomes couldn’t possibly imagine what life would be now, so why bother with these sets of directions at all? That’ll start an argument. And then we all get to fight another war. Because there are still plenty of people who study, and even memorize these sets of directions, and they take them very seriously.
If people can’t keep the directions straight when they come down from God, I suppose I shouldn’t get so annoyed when we cannot keep to the directions that came down from Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton. There are some who will contend that the people who wrote the Constitution way back in the olden days could not possibly imagine how the country would change in a few short centuries, and therefore we really should not take the document all that seriously. Or like the readers of those three earlier tomes, they will pick and chose among the directions for the ones that suit them, and try to ignore the rest, so that they can do with the country as they alone see fit.
It’s pretty clear that the men who wrote the Constitution had seen the folly and corruption when countries are ruled by a minority elite. They wrote this document to avoid turning the country over to kings and their various lords who ruled solely for the benefit of themselves. I suspect the framers of the Constitution would be appalled that we have pretty much allowed a ruling elite to assume power of this country, at the expense of the people, and that this elite is doing its best to turn our country into a clone of all those others that govern on the backs of the citizens.
Now most of our government is run by career politicians and bureaucrats whose every effort is to perpetuate their position of power, with little interest in that which is important to either the country or the citizens. This minority elite ignores the intent of the writers of the Constitution. The founders wished for citizen representatives to run the government, folks who would actually have the best interests of their fellow citizens in mind.
It is a shame that although it is the function of our government, as spelled out carefully in the Constitution, to protect the country, provide for uniform naturalization of immigrants, and defend each state against invasion, a minority elite has decided to ignore these directions so they can profit from the results.
And I have to wonder how, when the Constitution states that the government should function to promote the general welfare, our leaders have somehow decided that it is the job of government to instead put every citizen on welfare, utterly dependent upon government, and thus put themselves in control.
Now we live in a country that is controlled for the enrichment of a ruling elite, the very human corruption that also negated most of the benefit from those other sources of good directions, the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran. And the writers of the Constitution with their wonderful intentions, who had our best interests in mind, have become only a footnote in the rewritten history book.
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