Can We Finally Reset the Starting Point For the Constitution to Protect All Americans?

The Constitution was beautifully crafted to hold a society in balance yet to find compromise toward improving civilization. With the ratification of the Constitution, elites could live in peace with the masses. The common mand could hold dear the freedoms needed to pursue happiness. The wealth and property that each man held could be forever preserved from the tyranny of Government. Yet, The starting point of the nation was imbalanced for America began as a racially oppressive society of 1789. America’s beginning was not radically altered by its revolution to find a better starting point than that which contained slavery.

Instead, each societal improvement, each step forward, would have to painfully stem from 1789 America to improve the lives of citizens and chattel humans. By the Constitution’s design, minorities had vetos over the desires of the majorities. Slavery had been embodied in the Constitution, and slavery’s eradication could not be enforced on the South without affecting the balance of protections offered by the Constitution.

lnstead, a bloody, radical Constitutional reset of society’s starting point had to be constructed through a Civil War. We would begin again with all of the protections provided by the Constitution, yet this time all would be free men. Sadly for America, at the war’s end, the new starting point did not give African Americans the clean slate hoped for and paid dearly for by the loss of 600,000 souls, including sustainable voting rights and economic freedom to support their entrance into democracy. The new reset point that would be held in abeyance by the Constitution was a jim crow society that would oppress blacks for another 100 years.

The civil rights movement, including the sacrificial assassinations of its leaders, would reset the starting point once again. Yet this time, rather than confront a history of racism, whites would run to the suburbs, isolating blacks in urban plantations. This time, corporations would run to the corners of the earth escaping unions that clung to their hope of holding onto the few remaining middle class manufacturing jobs in a world a scarce of such labor opportunity.

America needs one more reset of the Constitution’s starting point, and we desperately need to get it right this time, for the cost of reset is enormous human suffering. This time, racial oppression must be resolved. This time, our economic system must secure jobs for all our citizens. How we deal with our inner cities will be a testament of America’s will to optimally reset the start of our Constitution for the modern era.