Thanks for joining me!
I have been very remiss in doing what I promised, not that any of you care about my thoughts on things. You can always delete these or ignore them. It’s still a free country (if we can keep it–a phrase attributed to Ben Franklin. Whether or not he actually said that is beside this point. I’m taking it out of context anyway. He supposedly was referring to our democratic republic as established by the Constitution.)
So let me talk about our freedom. It seems incongruous to me that people are saying government action to fight a deadly pandemic is unconstitutional. A quick review of that document shows 2 references that one purpose of a government is to “provide for the general welfare” or words to that effect. See the soaring words of the Constitution’s preamble and Article I, section 8. Article 1 establishes Congress and outlines its responsibilities. Does this not make actions to counteract a deadly virus very appropriate? Granted I am neither a lawyer nor a Constitutional scholar. I’m a simple boy from the hills of Virginia who learned how to read and think.
The Constitution is a spare 8,000 words, including the 27 amendments. Its relative brevity I think stems from the desire of our Founding Fathers not to state too much about what they saw this new “federal” government doing because so many people feared a repeat of the excesses of a monarchy or in our case, a large central government. The Articles of Confederation, our first attempt at a Constitution, proved to be a failure because the individual colonies (or states) retained all the power while the overall federal government had very little power. For example, we owed a lot of money to France that the Articles lacked a method to pay back. The articles essentially set us up to become a group of individual states similar to Europe with