This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated JUly 15, 2022
Independence Day was observed last week but for many, it felt less celebratory this year. Following the rollback of the constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion and the glut of horrific mass shootings in the preceding weeks, this Fourth of July did seem to arrive with a lot less independence. Feeling this way is not un-American. In fact, wanting the country to move closer to realizing its ideals is one of America’s foundational principles.
The path to July 4, 1776 was touched off six years prior by the Boston Massacre, where nine British soldiers shot and killed five Americans. Certainly, the framers of the Constitution, who lived during a time when five shooting fatalities was considered a massacre, never intended for any one American citizen to be able to possess in their hands a firearm with substantially more firepower than those nine professionally trained British soldiers combined.
The debate about reasonable gun safety laws is not just relegated to the framers of 246 years ago not being able to comprehend the destructive capacity of modern-day weapons. Today’s minority view – which happens to be the prevailing view on the Supreme Court – insists that we strictly interpret a 235-year-old document literally and base all our laws on that original text, yet has decided that the term “well regulated” really means “completely unregulated” and that the word “militia” actually means “any individual?”
The Constitution never guaranteed the right to any person to possess any type of firearm anywhere. And yet here we are. As America was still processing the mass school shooting in Uvalde, learning that dozens of well-armed officers chose for over an hour not to go in and confront a shooter with an assault rifle, America saw another mass shooting on the Fourth of July in Highland Park, Illinois.
The Founding Fathers’ land of the free was reserved for a select few. Allowing each state to decide who could vote, meant that for nearly a century, only white, property-owning men were guaranteed that right in every state, and it would take nearly a century more for the right to be extended to every citizen. Despite their glaring shortcomings, the framers of the Constitution did give us a pretty good blueprint for a democracy that can guarantee the rights of all, yet only if the majority fight for all to be afforded the same rights.
“…no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19. years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.”
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, 1789
Blueprints are integral to building something sound, but they are concepts. Constructing something based on those concepts takes hard work, and anything built 246 years ago, even based on extremely well-thought-out plans, needs to be fixed, updated, and added on to throughout the decades.
The New Utrecht Reformed Church on 18th Avenue in Bensonhurst is almost 200 years old. Although its foundation and most of the structure are original, it is not the same building it was in 1828, when it was erected. It has seen many changes, some of which have been to keep up with the times — like the additions of electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing — while others have been out of necessity to maintain its integrity and prevent it from collapsing. Some parts of it are missing altogether, lost to time as the world moves forward.
The Constitution. The Flag. The 4th of July holiday. They are what we make of them. Our parents and grandparents worked too hard to make them more representative of the ideals they espouse to allow them to be co-opted as the branding of those who would have us go backwards and take away constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, like the right to choose, that have been won.
The damage that has been done over the past few weeks, as well as the damage that will be coming in the near future, will not be undone over night, but the only way to right these wrongs is to keep moving forward every day, inch by inch, and not give in to cynicism and despair, as those who would have us revert to a previous, less free era expect us to do. This house is divided against itself and it requires major renovations to ensure its integrity and to prevent its collapse.
