Last night I was a guest for the first hour of the Jim Bohannon show, JimBoTalk.net. As part of the discussion Jim and I were talking about how far away from the Constitution our government has drifted.
I pointed out how our country is actually made up of 50 different nations, not 1 nation. Jim shot it down right away, “well that idea is long gone!” or something to that effect.
He’s right, it is…however our government was based on that premise. The fact that in practice we don’t subscribe to that model anymore makes me wonder.
You can fit a Chevy engine in on a Ford Frame, but it’s hard to make work and it never really works 100% correctly. It’s always a bit off, because its the wrong engine…the wrong chassis…the wrong wiring…nothing matches up. Sure you can make it work, but it’s never quite right.
Is that what we’re facing with our government today? We have a government model in which 13 countries (or States) came together and agreed to a Constitution with very limited powers given to the government which it created…the Federal Government.
Those powers were designed to help the States ensure mutual protection, to help ensure trade among the States, and to give the States and their Citizens a forum to resolve disputes which broke out between people in different jurisdictions.
Today, we’ve done away with the idea of independent States. Today, the states are a subset of the Federal Government.
It would be like Germany, Great Britain, France, Greece, etc being political Subdivisions of the European Union. They’re all Europeans first and are subservient to the EU government…. that would never happen because the people wouldn’t stand for it.
But today Virginians think of themselves as Americans first. Just the opposite in the EU, and it was just the opposite at the founding of our country.
So if we have completely turned our backs on the basic, underlying tenant of the US, namely the States are sovereign States – each of which has given a small part of it’s authority to the Feds in order to ensure easy trade, dispute resolution and mutual protection with the other States of the Union, then maybe it’s time we just scrape the entire Constitution and start over.
Maybe it’s time for a Constitutional Convention?!
Everte Farnell
PS. I shouldn’t have to mention this if you’ve been reading my stuff for any length of time, but we do have new folks joining us everyday, so just in case…No I don’t want to scrap the Constitution. I want to follow it…with the exception of electing Senators by popular vote. That should go back to the State Legislators choosing them.
Ryan RI read a book a little while ago cellad American Shaolin, where this young 20 s college student goes on an educational sabbatical from Princeton and decides to go to China and train with Shaolin Monks. The most disturbing thing that happens is his discovery of iron training where you focus on making one part of your body as impervious to harm as possible. Iron forearms would break staffs people where swinging at you, iron head practitioners could break swords over their heads. Then there was iron crotch. An iron crotch specialist could literally be lifted off the ground by the force of a kick to the balls and smile the entire time like you were tickling him. It talked about the exercises they have to do every morning, which was basically putting your junk on a table and punching it. So maybe iron constitution is a much larger compliment from a Chinese source than we are realizing.