Message to the future.

You’re there, same as I was long ago. You might be wondering who we were, what we did, what we thought. Let me spell it out-if you can think back to life 60,000 years ago.

The main thing we had was freedom. Some of us did, anyway. We had the ability to act how we desired, to think what we wanted, and to express what we felt. Sometimes there were restraints of the mind and of our actions, but not many. You could say we had maximal liberty, and we prided ourselves on that idea. It was precious. We lived in a place, a country, that even predicated its liberty within and on a document called The Constitution.

That document was seminal. Nearly everyone treasured it, too. It gave birth to our nation, or perhaps our nation gave birth to it, but it guided our republic, our laws and our society for hundreds of years. In fact, it represented to the entire world a place and foundation where all people could migrate to if they wanted to exist as a sovereign entity and live as a free man.

I don’t know if it endured.

I can’t begin to imagine what you now know of similar freedom and liberty. I doubt you have a constitution. My guess is, all that vanished well before your time, somewhere in the vast expanse of evolving time, the ages and the human condition. You might have something similar, but, if you do, I’ll bet it’s not any better nor as majestic. You’ll simply have to take my word for it that no greater glory has ever befallen a civilized nation and upon the sentient being.

For all I know, maybe you don’t need social contracts or legal documents or liberties. You might be a law unto yourself. Or maybe something fundamentally changed within societies, and your manner of being is alien to rules of social and civic interaction. Maybe you are all kings, all slaves or all a unified whole. It might be the case that reasons hence no longer require constitutions. Liberty might be a relic and a dinosaur, inasmuch as the systems under which you exist did long ago make moot the need for it.

None of this suggests we were perfect. We were not. Actually, our Constitution offered a prefatory note that indicated a goal toward perfection, thus admitting to inherent and systemic flaws. Our main flaw was slavery and slaves, mainly of blacks, coexisting while our nation’s motto spoke to liberty and freedom, and to equality for all. That contradiction and moral stain bedeviled us for decades and nearly put an end to our union, to our republic, to our nation.

Somehow, we made progress on ending what became identified as systemic racism, and on improving inequality, but, even as I write, these problems remain. It’s fair too say that these issues have prevailed upon us since Day One and have defined the tear in our structural fabric. We fought against each other over slavery, in a civil war, and it took untold deaths from that war and from subsequent conflicts to get us beyond slavery’s acceptability.

More to follow.