Celebrate The Business Plan
September 17th
is Constitution Day. America will
commemorate the 221st anniversary of the
great document’s signing. The day is second only to July
4th in national importance, but where are the
parades? Where are the fireworks? The incredible United
States Constitution, a document that is shorter than any
other nation’s constitution and has been working longer
than any other constitution in the world, gets no
respect. The Declaration of Independence gets all the
glory, but no President has ever sworn to preserve,
protect and defend the Declaration. The Declaration is
read aloud at major patriotic events, has millions of
copies hung on walls and even gets to star in a major
motion picture.
Meanwhile, no one ever
seems to get beyond the preamble of the Constitution.
Why does the Constitution get the short end of the
stick?
I’ve
concluded it’s because the Declaration of Independence
is the mission statement and the Constitution is the
business plan.
Why should a mission
statement be more popular than a business plan? It’s all
about the dream. People love it when a baseball player
calls his shot and points a finger out into the stands.
People loved it when President Kennedy said, “We chose
to go to the moon.” People, especially the American
people, love big, beautiful, ambitious dreams. As a rule
we are not so crazy about the hours of physical
discipline, training and sacrifice required to make a
home run possible or the years of engineering, debate
and trials involved in making a ship that goes to the
moon. We have lost our respect for the hard work, the
heavy lifting and the long hours involved in making a
dream possible.
In 1786, the dream of
America
was slipping away. There was talk of states seceding
from the union, news of Shay’s Rebellion and the economy
teetering on complete collapse. The form of United States government was laid out in the
Articles of Confederation, a government intentionally
kept very weak in order to protect the country’s hard
won Liberty and Independence.
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When the Philadelphia convention of
1787 was called together, it was under orders to
strengthen the Articles and fix the ineffectual parts of
government. It was already apparent to some at the
convention that only a complete rewrite would solve the
problems, and so the long, hard, tedious work began. The
work of creating a new system of government, one strong
enough to effectively govern without endangering the
rights and sovereignty of the people and States, would
take almost four months of proposal, argument and
compromise in the stifling heat of a Philadelphia
summer. Even then the work was not complete. There was
still the need for a Bill of Rights, for the States to
approve the new charter and for the ongoing process of
amendment. The final document, while imperfect, was a
work of genius that is still studied as a model of
government today. It became the blueprint for our nation
and the business plan for achieving the dream described
in the Declaration of Independence.
If you focus exclusively on
a post card of your dream destination and never consult
a map you can find yourself far from your target. Today,
the Constitution stands with 27 amendments.
Some of these amendments
have strengthened the Constitution, and some have
diminished it. Legislators and Justices argue its intent
and meaning. It remains the only thing that stands in
the center between the extremes of anarchy on one side
and tyranny on the other. A Government of the People, as
long as the people value such a thing. Maybe that is why
we should make a big deal out of Constitution Day. If we
don’t know what the Constitution says and we don’t
demand that our Government continues to obey its clearly
outlined powers, we could lose that dream laid out in
the Declaration of Independence. And then we won’t need
to celebrate the 4th of July either.
D.H.T. Shippey
September 08
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