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How do we in our polarized political environment fulfill the purposes stated in the Constitution of the United States of America?
Our Constitution's stated purpose is "to form a more perfect union, establish justice insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The Right wants a plutocracy and the Left wants an compassionate democracy. The plutocracy has forgotten the poor, the 4th World in the US, and the Left seems to concentrate more on middle income than poor residents. Corporatism flourishes with Welfare for the Rich, paying 11% tax on their profits whereas in 1960 they paid almost 50% tax. The gap between the rich and the poor grows with the right pushing for more Welfare for the Rich and less for the Poor. This environment is not just, will not insure domestic tranquility [if the Poor get a voice], does not provide for the common defense nor promote the general welfare nor secure the blessings of Liberty to all the people, and certainly does not secure ourselves and our posterity. What is the answer? It lies in moving from greed and selfishness to considering the rights of all in every action. It must spread from the grassroots to our elected officials if it is to be sustained bringing resulting justice, tranquility, common defense [against financial ruin as well as terrorism], promote welfare for all, and secure the blessings of liberty every person seeks for themselves and their offspring. Empathy, compassion, caring, fairness, reciprocity must dominate over group loyalty, authority, and purity in this process. How do we transform individuals from self-serving to community serving, what's best for all concerned? Religious institutions can lead us, not by promoting group loyalty, authority, and purity but through empathy, compassion, caring and fairness to all. What other groups can lead us in this? Or must we depend upon individual--of faith or not--to change? Will our nation collapse depending upon the empathy, compassion, caring and sense of fairness of the powerful in our country?
Closing Statement from Bill Davis
It is obvious after only a single not-on-the-topic comment, that few concern themselves with reconciling our polarized society OR I posed the question poorly...
Edwin Jose Palathinkal
Justice is important than mercy. If we let criminals suffer no consequence for their actions, like imprisonment, then it will necessarily result destruction of everything we hold valuable.
I use the hyperbole of criminality as examples, because although "justice as the opposite of mercy" is true universally it is not obvious to modern liberals in some circumstances.
"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification-that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero-that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions-that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement-that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit-and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence." -- The most hated person on this planet.