As the years progress, it is critical that society must progress, too.
What our country was built on is hardly relevant anymore. The Constitution doesn’t talk about half the things we face in current times: online privacy, women’s healthcare, voter fraud and many others.
The Founding Fathers, a group of middle- aged, rich white men, couldn’t even begin to fathom the necessity for women’s rights, black rights and LGBT+ rights.
Even the politicians of the last century have no idea what we now face. Presidents as recent as Bush and Obama couldn’t have anticipated what the country looks like today.
Suggesting that politicians of the past – no less white, male politicians – could possibly foresee these problems and understand them shows just how unwilling our country is to admit its flaws.
We are a nation steeped in triumphs, yes, but also steeped a great deal more in failures and atrocities. We have whitewashed our history and our laws. We have brainwashed our citizens into believing that our values back in 1776 should still be our values in 2019.
America has changed so much since we declared independence.
We have tried to make all of our citizens more equal (though that still needs a lot of work). We have tried to be the forefront of the industrial world. We have tried to be the country that all other countries want to be.
But it’s not enough to just try, and it’s not OK to stall our progress by calling these changes unpatriotic.
If you think that we’re straying from what our Founding Fathers hoped for America, good. We should be.
We should be getting as far away as we can from their racism, sexism, xenophobia.
We should be getting away from thinking we’re the best country with the best values.
We should be re-examining all of our history, not just the white parts.
If we give any attention to the Constitution, it should be to see how far we have come in our development as a nation.
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