The recent elegant opinion of Robert Wassman’s June 10 letter, “Bind governing to Constitution,” needs a reply. I would like to share a slightly different view.
The writers of our Constitution were white, rich, mostly landed gentlemen, who owned slaves. As humans, we know they could not be perfect. In their ignorance, they wrote very well about human equality, but ignored the other half of the human race and all of the nonwhite ones. They formed our complicated form of government because they hated kings and the abuse of power over those governed.
Unfettered capitalism was not a mandate or creation of our Constitution. Remember that Wall Street, that beacon of capitalism, the greediest place on Earth and the cause of more than one economic depression involving millions of our fellow citizens, had not yet been invented.
Hopefully, America will continue to be America, the land that I still love and fought to preserve. Hopefully, it will always be the land of the free. It seems that Wassman would prefer to go back to the Constitution of over 200 years ago. If you are rich, and white and powerful, perhaps that would be your choice. It would not be mine.
