I was scrolling through Tik Tok the other day and ran across a tearful young black father of three whose wife was in the hospital battling COVID-19. He was asking for prayers and a miracle to save her life. I stopped scrolling and offered up a prayer. But soon thereafter, I became frustrated with and disappointed in the human condition that leaves us vulnerable to preventable hardships like what was unfolding for this young family. We occupy this world together and the decisions we make and how we live our lives affects others. Our forefathers recognized this when they wrote the insightful preamble to our Constitution. The responsibility we have as citizens to maintain a balance between the common good and individual liberty makes me happy but also frustrates me.
The preamble reads: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States of America.” The preamble is simultaneously aspirational, directional, specific, and inspirational. It recognizes the that we are not perfectly united, but that is the direction we must head.
But let’s be real. Clearly, the goal of our nation to establish justice has not been fully realized as we continue to allow the poor and people of color to be over-policed, to receive harsher judicial sentences, to be under educated, and to allow crimes against them to be under-investigated. The injustice is evident when our media makes the disappearance of a white female the subject of national news when black females account for 1/3 of women who go missing and we rarely hear about them. The fact that we continue to allow known criminals like Donald Trump to go unprosecuted while black and brown men rot in jail or die at the hands of police for petty crimes, speaks volumes about our failure to establish justice. We the people must do better by electing better lawmakers who in turn make laws and appoint judges.
Another goal is to ensure domestic tranquility. Tranquility comes when we are all moving in the same direction because we have the same facts from which to make rational decisions. We need to rely on fundamental scientific facts. We need to rely on imperial data. We need to agree that the sky is blue, the earth is round, that we humans are one species, and that germs and viruses exist. A free press was supposed to deliver us reliable information. However, when fundamental truths become infected by speculation, misinformation, and lies for political power, financial gain, or religious persuasion, then our domestic tranquility moves toward divisiveness and away from tranquility. We’ve been here before when domestic tranquility has been disrupted. It was when the actual humanity of black slaves came into question. At that time it took a civil war to resolve that issue, but we are still grappling with the truth of black humanity as seen this past week by the treatment of Haitians at our southern border. We are also grappling with lies about this last election that will make it harder for we the people to vote.
When it comes to providing for the common defense, we have gone a bit overboard by creating the most well-funded and powerful military in the world. However, I don’t believe the founders intended for us to arm private militias that can overthrow our government under the guise of the 2nd Amendment. I believe the 2nd Amendment was meant for the common defense as it says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Of course, this viewpoint has been pre-empted by the capitalistic gun lobby, hate groups, and right wing Republicans. And as a consequence, we live with the daily carnage of mass shootings in schools, grocery stores, churches, work places, and movie theaters. This free access to guns does the opposite of leading to domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare.
But returning to our legitimate military, I think they have been tasked to do more than provide for our common defense; they are sent to police the world using our tax payer dollars. I’m for supporting other countries with soft diplomacy, not military force unless we are threatened. For example, I’m glad our military is out of Afghanistan, but I’d like us to provide the aid Afghanistan desperately needs to survive only if the Taliban provides safety and equal rights for women and safety to those who aided Americans in the past. Without these guaranteed safeguards there should be no foreign aid.
The role of the government as laid out by this preamble is to promote the general welfare. Can we acknowledge that human beings left to their own devices will sometimes act selfishly in ways that harm others? I’m thankful to live in a country where we can fight over the issue of individual rights versus the common good, but it can be counterproductive, too. Some countries don’t leave this up for debate, so their response to a public health crisis is swifter and often more effective. When it comes to COVID-19, I think it is past time for our government to put its foot down and as a matter of the general welfare, mandate masks and vaccines. The science is clear on the matter and reasonable people understand that individual liberty ends when there is a strong likelihood that individual reckless behavior will harm others. We put in mandates against drunk driving, against smoking in public spaces, and against falsely screaming fire in a crowded space. There should also be laws against spreading false lies about elections, about health issues, and false remedies. We have libel and defamation laws to protect individuals from false accusations. But it is high time to create laws against knowingly creating and spreading false information that is detrimental to the general welfare and undermines our system of government. These laws should be particularly targeted at public officials and those who hold public trust positions like doctors and the news media.
Was it intentional that the writers of the preamble made personal liberty last? I think so. It makes perfect sense that it is only after we have secured our common good that the writers of the preamble added the security of the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. Those blessings can only be enjoyed after the common good has been attended to. Otherwise, if we allow personal liberty to take priority over the common good, we will all end up in tears like the young black man on Tik Tok.