This Needs Fixin'

Situations change, people change, governments change; and now the United States is not the country they taught you that it was back in grade school civics.

And it needs to just end.

To be honest, the U.S. has never actually been that shining example of wisdom, fairness and opportunity that gets trotted out in civics classes; most of us probably suspected that that wasn’t really how the country worked, at some level.

Even as school children, what we saw in the news obviously didn’t line up very well with what we were told the country was about.

Much that the State did was clearly foolish, people were not treated fairly and opportunities for a better life were definitely easier to find for some than for others.

But the country did seem, at least, to be trying.

Journalists did actually try, at times, to hold the powerful accountable.

People were fired, resigned even, over violating the principles we were taught united the states.

At the very least, political rhetoric depended entirely on espousing the dream country of schoolroom civics as an ideal.

Even that, alas, appears to have gone now. And now the U.S. gets to face, for the second time, the biggest error the founders made in drafting the Constitution.

It has no escape clause.

While the Declaration of Independence did recognize, explicitly, that changing times can mean that political bonds must fall the Constitution was written without that particular bit of wisdom.

The last time that issue came up in a big way, we ended up with the Civil War; years of death and destruction that, interestingly, resulted in the cultural inheritors of the losers in that civil war being in control of the government today and driving us towards the next one.

Oh, the irony.

The wise thing to do, of course, would have been to have the Constitution specify a process for a state to withdraw from the Union. Or at least to have added a process in the 1850s rather than forcing the Civil War.

Or to add one real quick-like now, to head off the pressure that’s building up in reaction to Trump & Musk’s attempt to tear down any bits of the State they still haven’t managed to corrupt.

But I doubt at this point that enough Americans could even agree on that.

So, let this time be a lesson: countries need an escape clause.

Just like a marriage may sometimes need a divorce and it’s better to just have a pre-nup than to have it dissolve into fights and bitterness, sometimes countries need to dissolve and it’s better to just have a vote over it than it is to to start shooting.

When the next constitution gets written, remember that: make sure there’s a way to withdraw from (or to just dissolve) the constitution without having to have a full-on civil war.

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