An American letter

The American Constitution was founded on a simple principle - consent of the governed. These Founding Fathers looked at the historical cycle of oppression and revolution and asked the question: How can we free ourselves from this seemingly endless cycle? How can we form a more perfect union? And they set about the business of initiating a process aimed at perfecting the relationship between the people and the instrument of their collective will - government. American democracy was born.

This fledgling child, born in this American cradle a mere 235 years ago, pitted against 10,000 years of pharaohs, kings, tyrants, shahs, czars, despots and dictators, is now in need of further nurturing.

If American Democracy is about the development of a "more perfect union," the question becomes: a more perfect union of what? A more perfect union of who? Ideas like equal justice and "one man one vote" were not settled the day they signed the document. The settlement of the meaning of these ideas was left as an open question to be asked of ourselves over and over again: what constitutes a more perfect union?

The process of developing this more perfect union has been a process of gradual inclusion of groups of people who actually live in America, but were perhaps not accounted for specifically in the original document. This "absence of inclusion" was, from the beginning, at odds with the idea of equal justice.

It is the imperative toward equal justice that has been the conscience of the constitution from the beginning. Aversion to hypocrisy is our conscience at work. Enfranchisement of the disenfranchised is the actualization of a more perfect union stemming from an aversion to hypocrisy.

It took 90 years for this constitutional dissonance to precipitate a civil war over slavery, and it took another hundred years to enact the meaning of that conflict into civil rights legislation. It took nearly a hundred years to acknowledge that there were other people already living here when we arrived - Native Americans. Genocide pricks our conscience, as it should.

What this means is we spent the first 190 years of our democracy figuring out how to acknowledge that black people and native Americans were actually PEOPLE, who LIVE HERE, and deserve equal justice and the right to vote! This kind of genius is hard to come by in what we see happening today.

We can characterize the development of our democracy in terms of the groups of people who have fought for and won some measure of equal justice. I think of them in terms of four basic groups: women, working people, ethnic people, and young people. A fifth group has emerged to gradually secure some measure of equal justice: gay people.

Women's Suffrage, minimum wage and collective bargaining laws, civil rights, lowering the voting age to 18, eliminating "don't ask don't tell," are all elements that are the attempt to perfect our union by acknowledging and including people who actually live here. America has been the "light of the world" precisely because of the development of this kind of inclusion. But in recent years this light has been flickering.

It is ironic that, just at the very moment in history when democracy is getting a toehold in places around the world where we have promoted it, like the Middle East for instance, we seem to be losing our grip on it here. Will the Egyptian Spring coincide with an American Fall? We cannot let that happen.

The forces at work in this country that are out to dismantle voting rights in the states- we all know which political party this is- must be stopped before they succeed in reversing 235 years of the hard work it has taken to advance the cause of equal justice.

And they can be stopped- calmly and without rancor, by using our fragile right to vote, the consent of the governed, to put things right in Congress. To put people there who understand that when most people are doing pretty well, (a strong middle class), then the hardest workers among us flourish. That is the American Dream at its best.

Voting rights are like what your dentist told you about your teeth: ignore them and they will go away.

We are rich enough, strong enough, wise enough, and kind enough to find our American conscience.

Stephen D. Bruno is a Hayden resident and 19th precinct chair for the Kootenai County Democratic Party.