Every year on July 4th for the past several years, I've posted a picture of Declaration of Independence to Facebook, along with the following text and my simple thought, that it’s one hell of a mission statement, and it only took 29 words.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
I haven't done the research, so I can't speak to why, but this simple statement, by a very flawed man (ok, he was brilliant, but he did own slaves), was not incorporated into the Constitution.
Maybe it should be. It would probably make things a lot easier if the justices of the Supreme Court, or, you know, the executive and legislative branches, could come back to one very simple mission statement when doing the job that we hired them to do. As it is, lawyers on both sides of issues can't refer to it because it really isn't the law of the land.
Someone I know once told me that I write better when I'm angry. On a scale from "irked" to "murderous rage", I'm probably at "rolling boil"
For years, I had a very simple approach to customer service, advanced by my dad, and later christened as "The 12 Words of Fox":
Don't Lie
If You Say It, Do It
Tell Bad News Fast
We put it into our FAQ as one of the first items, and pretty much anyone who ever worked with me can recite it by heart. Because we incorporated it into the basis of our existence as a company. It was woven into our metaphorical DNA, so to speak.
You know why? Because it solved almost every single problem we had when we didn't have rules / policies to handle the specific problem.
I don't know why I get so exorcised about gay marriage. I've never been gay. No interest. I know a grand total of 2 gay couples which, in Seattle, is nearly impossible to do, and one of those couples lives in Boston. But I did have the pleasure of welcoming one of the two pairs to American citizenship, with all or most of the rights and benefits that I take for granted, on the Friday afternoon after the Supreme Court decision.
The fact that I had to do so at all pisses me off. The fact that the number of groups of people that I am going to do something similar to/for in the coming years is something that really, really pisses me off. These are not really difficult concepts. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has the exact same rights. And responsibilities, too, but that's a separate subject.
It's what we're supposed to live up to. America has done an awful lot of bad stuff. I don't need a list - I'm an amateur historian and can probably provide a longer list than you can possibly imagine.
The decisions to do those bad things were made by people who were flawed in a lot of ways, and a lot of people like to point them out and say that we have no business talking about freedom and liberty given our own history.
They're mostly right. Except for one thing. The good stuff America has done is exponentially larger than the horrific things that we've done while guaranteeing certain rights, like Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Don't send me a list - I'm an amateur historian and can probably provide a longer list than you can possibly imagine.
And we tend, over time, towards fixing the places where we screwed stuff up. It's never fast enough, nor does it solve all of the problems. Sometimes the fixes create more problems than intended, and then the cycle repeats. Maybe it's my IT background, but that sounds an awful lot like debugging to me.
I took a PoliSci course in my senior year of college on a pass/fail basis, which frustrated the professor to no end, especially when I answered 12 questions on the final exam and walked out of the room after about 3 minutes. The one thing I remember more vividly than anything, however, was when we were talking about the Tyranny of the Majority and the risks that it entailed for a democracy and how the Founders were well aware of the problem, so they structured the government that we have now, which is a representative (rather than direct) democracy and had checks and balances between the three main parts of government.
Simply put, this is the tendency of people to subvert or otherwise impede the rights of those who are in the minority of public opinion or race or class or however else we decide to subdivide ourselves. We want to be part of the winning team, the people who come out on top, and the majority tends to alter the rules in their favor to stay in the majority.
Want to know where the real meat of all of the campaign spending that takes place in the next election cycle is going to take place? Ignore the ads. The meat is with the statisticians who are slicing, dicing, and otherwise attempting to figure out the right balance of subdividing so that they can get to 50.1% of the vote, and the winner can then claim that their views represent the entire country. That's the net effect of the Tyranny of the Majority. I have another word for it. Bullshit.
Wait. I'm almost there. I don't have any particularly on-topic ideas about how to fix it short of calling a Constitutional Convention, which pretty much everyone on both sides is terrified of doing. Maybe if we just added those 29 words as the next Amendment. I'd love to see a politician try to make a case against doing so - it would be watching someone commit political suicide, broadcast live on CNN. Or, as I think of it, any Donald Trump news conference. (I'm trying to keep my personal feelings out of this, but that guy is barely qualified to drive, let alone be President).
I'm not advocating a position or a set of policies, or a candidate, other than one single thought that I'll get to very soon. American history has shown a remarkable ability to snap back from extremes on both sides. It has happened before, and it will happen again. All I ask is that you do two things during this ridiculously long election season - remember that while I was making a joke to that lesbian couple welcoming them to full American citizenship (they've been married for pretty much as long as Washington has had same-sex marriage), there was an element of truth and, when you are evaluating candidates, go back to the Mission Statement.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. It doesn't get more simple than that.
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