Our Founding Fathers Would be Amazed.

The constitution that our Founding Fathers left us is a liberal document, providing freedom of speech, religions, assembly and property - about as liberal as anybody was thinking back in the late 1700s.  Yet, if they could come back today they would be amazed.  They would also be lost.  We often talk about  them as if they were creatures of our world who had solved the bulk of human problems, had foreseen our mission in the world and had built our current nation.  However, they would however probably feel more at home in the world of Julius Caesar than in the United States of 2011.  Forget the airplanes, TV, computers, internet, forget the amazing inventions like the revolver, the repeating rifle, and nuclear weapons,  forget also strange new words like “germs”,  “GPS”,  “Typewriter”,  they might be more intrigued by words like “California”, “Idaho”, “Nevada”, “Oklahoma”, “Alaska”, “Hawaii”.  They didn’t even think about healthcare since germ theory was undreamed of, inoculations were not a realistic factor,  and even though some of our Founding Fathers lived to a ripe old age, the average life expectancy  of the citizens of their new nation was probably around 35 years.  The words that they wrote down were written with a feather from a bird with the juice from a berry, and were carried on the back of a horse or across the sea by the wind.

Our Founding Fathers lived in a world in which natural resources were an extremely serious problem - because there were way too many of them.  The available resources actually impeded the nation-building process.  The legacy they left us provided for the pollution and careless disregard of the world’s greatest storehouse of natural resources in less than 120 years - by then the great forests were gone, the great plains were gone and the world’s richest topsoil had blown into the sea.  The great rivers were all polluted - some so badly that they would catch on fire.  

The total population of the United States that the Founding Fathers created their constitution for was less than 4 million people, about the same number as now live in Atlanta or Houston or Boston or Dallas, it was only about 1/3 that number of people who now live in the greater Los Angeles area or  less than 1/4 of those who now live in the greater NYC area.  Almost 700,000 of them (more than 15%) were slaves, and probably about half of them couldn’t vote - why?  Oh, because they were females, of course.   Almost all of the population  (95%) was rural and farmed for a living.  The largest city, Philadelphia had 44,000 people.  The entire population of the WORLD itself in 1770 was less than 800 million people or  about 2.5 times that of the United States  today.  The legacy left by the “Founding Fathers” was a clear  trail of disaster for Negroes, Chinese laborers, and worst of all for the Native Americans who were victims of genocide and subjugation.