In the Preamble to the US Constitution, its authors wrote that the purpose of the document was to:

* Form a more perfect Union,
* Establish Justice,
* Insure domestic Tranquility,
* Provide for the common defence,
* Promote the general Welfare, and
* Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

So, what does that mean?

I think the Founders knew they weren’t perfect and that the nation would evolve. Our simple and elegant Constitution was designed to grow and evolve with the nation as it matured into a more perfect union. It never was meant to be unchanging. Our Founders knew that times would change, that nothing is ever static.

As for establishing justice, our court system was intended to allow access to all. People are created equal. Of course, in the original document, only men who owned property were considered equal. There were no rights for African-Americans, Native Americans or women. Since the Constitution was written, justice has become available to them as well, although people with better resources tend to have better outcomes in the system than do the poor. Still, the aim is to evolve so that access and outcomes are more equal.

Of course, justice in my mind includes social and economic justice. There’s little of that in this nation today as working Americans face a jobless economic “recovery” that has offered record profits to corporations that, in turn, refuse to hire new workers. And as far as paying taxes, the Center for Tax Justice, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, says “the U.S. is already one of the least taxed countries for corporations in the developed world,”  as a percentage of gross domestic product. Who’s worse? Only Iceland.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that the United States has the worst income inequality of the 24 industrialized nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. We’re even behind Pakistan and Ethiopia.

That isn’t justice, although those who claim to want to follow the intentions of the Founders are the very ones fighting to give corporations more and more power. Something’s bass-ackwards here.

As for insuring domestic tranqulity, our gun laws do little on that front. I’m not saying no one should ever own a gun, but no one needs to own an assault rifle. The Second Amendment has been taken to its limits and beyond in allowing too many people who shouldn’t own guns to get their hands on one (or more).

In addition, our own political leaders do little to promote donestic tranquilty with their confrontational, less-than-truthful approach to public policy. It’s in-your-face and to hell with the consequences. The rhetoric promotes discord, even violence, not domestic tranquility.

And how do we rate at providing for the common defence? Well, we’re good at starting wars, although not many of them have anything to do with protecting Americans. We send American soldiers on deployment after deployment, and when they come home damaged physically and emotionally, we abandon them. The wars we wage enrich big corporations that snag no-bid contracts to provide substandard, even dangerous, services and housing, but they leave families shattered and impoverished.

Promote the general welfare. Let’s see, we’re slashing every social safety net out there so we don’t have to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans or close corporate tax loopholes. People are dying for lack of health care, they’re forced into homelessness because of the greed of Wall Street, whose executives have prospered from the misery they’ve caused.

Promoting the general welfare might mean getting health care to all Americans, regulating the greed of Wall Street and the huge corporations and, actually creating jobs instead of killing them. The Tea Party darlings in Congress have taken us to the precipice of disaster in their so-called negotiations over the debt ceiling, and we might well topple off the edge because of their desire to see President Obama fail.

We are not doing anything to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, at least not for most of us. I suppose if you happen to be the progeny of a fabulously wealthy corporate executive, you’ll have plenty of “blessings,” but not if you’re the child of a working American.

Those of us on whose backs this country was built are now watrching it crumble.

This is hardly the nation the people who wrote our Comstitution envisioned.