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Moving Forward

Guest columnist Howard Carmichael HOWARD CARMICHAEL·SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2020·READING TIME: 3 MINUTES

Somewhere along the way we’ve lost our vision of who we are as a nation, what we want as a union. Those things are, or should be, the core of what we believe is our government. When this nation began, it was simply understood that our government must be us, for it to exist at all we had to be participants. Instead, for the past several decades, we -- too many of us -- have been persuaded that government is a separate thing, beyond the reach of most. Even worse, too many of us dismiss government as bad, to be avoided. Our Constitution, in the first sentence, lays out the very few goals our Founders considered most important for our government to pursue; those goals include a fundamental security -- involving union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense -- and then the part we've somehow lost track of: 'promote the general welfare'. All of them are intended to 'secure the Blessings of Liberty'. We desperately need a fulsome conversation about these things, here and now, to release ourselves from the hobbles of what a very few -- a few with radical ideological cause -- demanding to tell us what those Founders meant, what they would do today. It's our world, and our responsibility, to decide for ourselves, not allow cramped political ideology to set our course or our limits. Only after coming to at least basic agreement on these things can we go forward on our choices, on how to accomplish them.

"It's time we thought of government as good..."

It's time we thought of government as good, the best tool for moving ourselves, participants, towards the elusive 'more perfect union'. Over time, especially through the past century, most of our Constitutional goals have been corrupted by barrages of money, and the pursuits of money, to the comparative benefit of a tiny portion of us. We no longer seem to remember all those original goals. We measure goals we admit by cost; those who argue for the good of them are ignored or marginalized or ridiculed. Even for the goals that survive, we find ways to skip past reality, not pay for them, blithely borrowing from our future. The Founders certainly could never have imagined our misuse of debt. Our political conversation is all too often based on cost alone; cost has almost become its own ideology. We drift away from the most difficult goal, to 'promote the general welfare'. It's called 'general welfare' because it belongs to all of us. Now, after the most extreme years, the greatest insult to our political life, we must change the way things have become, or very probably the 'great American experiment' will end. Ignominiously. The crown jewel of progressive political thought produced by the Enlightenment, the longest lasting democratic representative republic in history, as flawed as it might have been, as flawed as it might remain, may be swept aside by the crass, greedy, least able among us to consider 'the general welfare' at all. If it is to be saved, it's up to us, today, now.

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