Late last year, while living in Roanoke, Virginia, I submitted this op-ed to the Roanoke Times. It was published on January 14, 2020, and to date has received 0 comments. I stand by every word of what I wrote, and to hell with those of you who embrace the status quo or turn a blind eye to it.
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BREAKING NEWS
September 16, 1787
Pennsylvania State House
The Philadelphia Convention, which has been convening since the twenty-fifth day of May, has dissolved without producing a constitution. The dissolution was unanimous among the fifty-five delegates to what has come to be called the “Constitutional Convention” and followed the debriefing of the delegates Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison Jr., who this morning were escorted back to present day by a time traveler from the year of our Lord two thousand nineteen AD. The delegates have suspended their work indefinitely.
At the heart of their decision is the model of governance known as the separation of powers, which would have divided our government into three branches, each with its own separate and independent powers. The honorable gentleman Benjamin Franklin was appalled at what he had seen in the future, noting that “three co-equal branches of government are an impossibility when a single political party controls the Presidency and the Senate. Republican Senators were consistently violating their oath of office by putting party ahead of country to defend the habitual lies and inexcusable and repeated abuse of power in which the President engaged. And the Democrats are equally to blame for the current state of affairs. Knowing what I know now, I cannot in good conscience create a framework for a national government that in less than two hundred fifty years has become a den of tribal thieves, liars, hypocrites, adulterers, enablers, and braggarts. Moderateness, civility, and common sense are dead among the Government AND the People.”
The honorable gentleman Alexander Hamilton went even further, tearing up the document they had toiled for months to create. “I’ll have no part in founding a government that becomes choked with partisan buffoons who care for nothing and no one but themselves. And shame on the People for not only tolerating those buffoons but re-electing them time after time.”
The honorable gentleman James Madison Jr. was visibly shaken when detailing how the Second Amendment to the constitution they were by all accounts a mere day away from signing had been perverted: “Our amendment does not grant the individual the right to bear arms, yet bestows that right on the members of a well regulated Militia, which is ‘necessary to the security of a free State.’ A State can be neither secure nor free if hundreds of millions of arms are in the hands of the People. The People of the twenty-first century are violent, arrogant, and paranoid, and have spat on the foundations of the nation that my fellow countrymen and I committed treason against the Crown to establish.”
According to multiple sources, the time-traveling party first stopped at Mount Vernon to brief General George Washington, who did not attend the “Constitutional Convention.” That honorable gentleman has been warning about the dangers of political parties and was disgusted that future “Americans” have “lost their way and descended into wanton intolerance, greed, and tribalism. By any measure, the President and Congress in the year of our Lord two thousand nineteen are disgraces, and the People have gotten what they deserve.”
UNSALTED GEMS 