Many may ask "But why do you say it is broken?" I would respond that I have come to the
conclusion that we will never pass a law or any set of laws that can repair
what is broken in our system.
In other words, we say we have a Rule of Law system, that we are
governed by laws and not by men. But
this assumption is false. It is not
even what the founding fathers actually believed.
In his writings, Thomas Jefferson said:
"It
is the manner and spirit of a people, which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker that soon
eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."
From
this Jefferson concluded that only the citizen farmer was spiritually
independent and free of moral corruption sufficient to effectively operate a
democratic government.
As a public servant who has been both a prosecutor and a trial
judge I can attest to the fact that our laws and our constitution are not the
problem. Today our jails are full of
those who are poor, addicted to drugs, or who are mentally ill.
But we also fail to acknowledge that it is not only the criminal
who suffer from these scourges. Nearly
every child dependency case, every divorce and every foreclosure action
involves either fear of poverty, drugs, mental illness or some combination of
these. And those who sit in the seats
of power, those who make the decisions, are not immune from the struggle for
wealth, for physical health or even for sanity.
I cite Jefferson because
it may be that his thoughts, at one time, were correct, about farm life
and the virtues it creates in people.
But if this is so we must also face the fact that we are no longer a
nation of inherently virtuous farmers.
We are now something else. We
must ask: What are we a Nation of? What have we become? Will what we have become make better
citizens? And if not, is there a way to
change it?
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