Wed, Apr 1st, 2009
Law In Trying Times
I want you to think about something that I find amazing.
Read the paper. Watch the news. Look at your friends’ comments on Facebook. These are difficult days.
People are unsure of their finances, their jobs, their future. They are restless and unsteady.
These are the times in other countries that people would be talking about revolution. But, absent a few crazies, that is not happening in America. It didn’t happen when George W. Bush won the White House in a highly controversial matter nine years ago, and it won’t happen now.
The reason? We are ruled by our laws, not our rulers.
It is almost incomprehensible that a bunch of dead pseudo-aristocrats could put together a framework so strong that it would hold together a quarter of a millennium later, and do so under the most trying of circumstances, but that’s what John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and the others who framed our government did. George Washington resisted the urge to become the next king. Adams remembered the lessons from the bills of attainder cases instead of forgetting them. And despite the fact that every one of these men had their own private (and sometimes public) moments of power-grabbing, they still managed to keep enough perspective to install a system that would work over the centuries.
Did they know they were doing that? I doubt it. The longest any real republic had stood in their lifetime was about a century, and that was one vastly different from the one they devised. But regardless, it is a beautiful and amazing thing, and something to behold in our unsure climate.
Look around at the debate. Think about what you would be hearing in other places. And be glad that you are ruled by laws and not rulers.
