Letter to the editor: ‘More perfect’

To the editor:

“We The People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”

That legitimate questions can be asked about the sustainability of our social compact cannot be surprising. During the past 243 years it has always been thus. Our Constitution itself is premised on the progressive idea that successive generations must be prepared to question existing institutions in the process of making a more perfect union.

The generation of the American Revolution broke from a no longer sustainable tradition of fealty to a king by redefining themselves as citizens rather than subjects. The Civil War was fought to break through a no longer sustainable house divided between slave and free states. The next generation of American progressives, that of Teddy Roosevelt, curbed the power of corporate combinations, recognized the rights of labor, set aside vast tracts of land to be kept for the benefit of the public, and rejected as no longer sustainable the political repression of women. The New Deal generation reordered the relationship between the government and the people, recognizing that laissez-faire economics were not sustainable in an increasingly interdependent society. Because racism and misogyny had become unsustainable, the next generation took on Jim Crow and pushed for Equal Rights.

When the process of making a more perfect union ceases, America will justly go onto the trash heap of political experiment. The Green New Deal may seem extreme, and some of it may be the stuff of pipe dreams, but, at the least, it properly asks fundamental questions about the sustainability of our less than perfect union.

William Skepnek,

Lawrence

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