We are all taught, seemingly in the cradle, about the glorious Constitution, a document that lies at the very heart of America’s civil religion. Schoolchildren leather handbags used to be taught to memorize broad swaths of its provisions (although it’s extremely doubtful that this is done today, in the wake of the disastrous ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy), along with the national mythology of the Founding Fathers as latter-day Olympians handing down poker chip set freedom from the heavens. Of all our myths, those inculcated in early childhood are those the hardest to shatter, because they are often the foundations of our understanding. But all nations have founding myths. The Greeks, for centuries, believed in a pantheon of capricious and often malevolent gods, like Zeus, Athena, Hera, and Ares, to explain anxiety treatment the uncertainties and travails of life, death, wisdom and war. The ‘founding fathers’, as taught to US kids, is a modern American myth, for how can slave owners be bringers of freedom, unless they free their slaves? And almost all of them — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson — even Patrick Henry (he of ‘Give me liberty,or give me death’ fame) — owned slaves, even as he uttered these words, and then wrote them. MOVE supporter, I. Abdul Jon used to say, ‘You only need to talk and write about freedom of speech, and freedom of religion and all other kinds of freedom if you ain’t got it; ’cause if you got it, and ain’t got no problem with nobody else havin’ it — and it’s real, you ain’t gotta write …
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