American History I

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are the two foundations for the rights of citizens and residents of the United States, and together have been an extraordinarily durable political legacy in the history of the world, for over two centuries.  Both are under terrible, terrible threat in your historical moment in the present day — perhaps most so by Orwellian political constituencies that claim to be upholding these documents even as they wreak the opposite.

Do you already know the two documents by heart?  Are you, in fact, now reading them with close attention and serious thought for this week’s reading assignment?  If so, why?  If not, why not?

In other words, are you making it difficult, or are you making it easy, for your rights, and other people’s rights, to be taken away?....

And are you making it difficult, or are you making it easy, for political constituencies to undermine the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and destroy their protections, even as they loudly proclaim, in Orwellian fashion, to be “patriotic”?....

The bottom line:  How does a democracy work?  If not by you, then by who?  If not democracy, then what?....