Founders' flexibility a blessing
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Editor,
I was sitting in MacDonald's in Polson Sept. 16 thumbing through the Valley Journal and munching food I shouldn't be eating. A letter to the editor recommended a book on the founding of this country and the construction of the brilliant Constitution that has served our nation basically from its birth. I take issue with the final sentence in the first paragraph, which read, "Following is a list of the 28 principles explained in the book that guided the founders of this country as they designed a free-people nation and wrote the Constitution, giving freedom, equality and justice to all."
I haven't read the recommended book, but I have read lots of history books and am familiar with the Constitution. I'd just like to remind the writer of the letter to the editor and the readers of the Journal that the Constitution our founders wrote failed in its original form to give "freedom, equality and justice to all" — unless you were a white landowner, of course. What the framers did do, by a stroke of genius, foresight or divine inspiration, was to create a document that could evolve and change to accommodate a changing and evolving society. We now have relative "freedom, equality and justice to all."
However, in the beginning of this country and for many decades we did not, brilliant Constitution notwithstanding. Certain immigrants, Irish, Chinese, Germans, etc., suffered horrible injustices. Women had few rights and could not vote. Kids worked in filthy factories from sunup until sundown. African slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person (a compromise between the North and the South that gave benefits to both sides but none to the slaves themselves). They would not get "freedom, equality and justice to all" until they fought bitterly for it during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But probably the most ironic of all injustices was the fact that the Natives were not even considered citizens in their own land.
Thank you, founders, for a flexible Constitution, because without it, we would not have been able to become the country we are today. Flawed as we are, we are still a country of relative "freedom, equality and justice to all."
Susan Diesen
Polson
