My America (Why I long for action under Article V)

I recall standing in my 1st-grade classroom wearing a white shirt, and navy-blue tie and pants, facing the American Flag in the right corner of the room and pledging allegiance. Fort McHenry, the monuments and canon in Patterson Park and listening to stories of Baltimore during both world wars were also part of my life.

Today’s American is a different place, or maybe knowledge, education and lots of experience opened my eyes to the ‘good old days’ and how we came to be here today.

·     Gangbangers, cartel members in the USA, and drug dealers live every moment under the threat of violent death, so the death penalty is certainly not a deterrent.

·     Any criminal, insane person, or people looking to make some fast cash can walk into ‘gun shows’ and buy guns from ‘private parties’ without any background check. Of course, stealing guns that are legally owned is still in vogue.

·     People that fear no law have easy access to all the guns they want.

·     The media convinces us that our biggest problem is the police, using bad language, and finding men who behaved as was normal decades ago, and Hispanics entering the USA illegally. That’s it. Nothing else is a ‘big deal’. After all, most shooting victims are Black and that doesn’t matter unless a White person is the shooter. After all, most victims are involved in crime, except for the innocents slaughtered in the cross-fire.

Like trained seals, many people blame parents, a race, or a religion. Many otherwise sane people say that refugee children torn out of their mothers’ arms, shipped to an unknown location and put into chain link cages have a better life than they did with their parents.

Many Americans honestly believe a wall that can be scaled with a homemade ladder is the solution to problems caused by the 70-thousand pages of our immigration laws.

We abandoned participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Paris Climate Pact, and criticize France, Great Britain, and Germany while we embrace North Korea, Russia, and China. We break international agreements instead of working to improve those commitments. We continue our war on poor people in the United States instead of a war on poverty. We decrease health care for our most vulnerable citizens.

This year, both Houses of Congress exceeded the president’s enormous request to increase defense spending and continue to buy weapons that even the Pentagon told Congress they do not want. As we invest in more weapons and bombs, we do nothing to raise our investment in education, leaving us at number  22 in the amount of money nations around the world pay teachers. (Our education rankings and the treatment of teachers is embarrassing in every category).

Millions of Americans are weary of our dynastic presidencies. We did not want another Bush or another Clinton. Millions are fearful of the tremendous cultural changes due to immigrants. Millions are tired of the political correctness that goes so far as suspending little children for using words found in the Christian Bible deemed to be hate speech. In fact, a grade school principal marched a student from the school cafeteria because she was reading the Bible. That principal threw the Bible into the trash and said it was filled with hate speech.

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or all these reasons I wonder if we could actually use Article V of the U.S. Constitution and have our state legislatures call for a Constitutional Convention. Twenty-eight states have already requested such a convention and that means we only need 6 more state legislatures to make a formal request to meet the two-thirds majority that would require such a convention. Although the states have different Amendments in mind, once a convention is called for any specific purpose delegates at the convention can consider any number and any variety of changes to the Constitution. An Article V convention, in this fashion, could be a vehicle for a comprehensive rewriting of the Constitution, even for an altogether new Constitution.

Since most Americans know very little about their Constitution and their government, it could take a decade for such an event to occur. What is more likely is that the Congress would begin actually doing something to resolve the thorny issues of immigration reform, the right to bear arms, Social Security, and our bloated military budget.

Still, it is fun to think about a new Constitution or significant Constitutional changes to deal with the times and the issues of today, instead of operating as if it is still 1789.