Constitution And National Soul Essay, Research Paper

A constitution really only reflects the type of people who wrote it, the time

peroid when written and the people over time who will find ways to exploit it.

Although we are raised to believe that a constitution is the greatest thing

since sliced bread, there are many flaws. Section 2.1 (d) of the Aug. 28, 1992

Constitutional Accord states: "Canadians and their governments are

committed to the vitality and development of official language minority

communities throughout Canada." Except in 2.1(b) concearning native

languges, all other languges are delibertely left out. This is utterly and

completely racist. This leaves out millions of Canadians and turns them into

"second class citizens." It would be more appropiate to have "offical"

replaced with "white." How can we preach equality if were not equal.

If we left no room for racisim in our constitution we would have the word

"official" replaced with "working" since it is neutral but

still recognizes that French and English are the most dominant languges.

However, the Canadian constitution is not alone in it’s racisim. When the

American constitution was written to uphold equality for all and the freedom to

pursue happiness, were the blacks of the country involved. No, of course not.

The constitution refleceted only the white peoples values at the time. The

people who wrote it. Which brings me to my next point. Written constitutions

primarly are flawed since they can’t evolve with the nation. They usually

represent ignorant views that are no longer relevent to modern society. How good

will our constitution be in two hundred years? How good will it be in five

hundred years? A good example of this would be the American right to bear arms.

This initially was in order to protect themselves from the British and probably

made perfect sense, at the time. But now this is totally absurd. People have to

live in fear and protect themselves, ironically enough, with guns because there

are so many out there. There are school shootings it seems once every month and

putting control on guns is nearly impossible because it is protected by the

constitution. This correlates directly with my last point. Writing a

constitution gives practically total immunity to every (Warning!! Good Guliver’s

Travels symbolisim about to be injected.) yahoo out there. The biggest example

of this is the N.R.A., despite some good promotion by Charlton Heston. They have

the right to bear today’s most deadly assualt weapons because they know they can

hide behind the all powerful constitution. The constitution in the U.S. is

exploited so a bunch of rednecks can play with their guns. All attempts of

control on these weapons is continually knocked down because it is

unconstitutional. Hell, that part of the American constitution will probably

never change. Which shows just what kind of damage can be done with the

constitution. All my contempteous arguing can be summed up in this: "A

constitution is a mirror attempting to reflect the national soul." This

leaves room for inevitable error but ensures that we are forever continuing to

improve our constitution.