Enyart: We Can Make Politics Better
The first time I uttered the words “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” I was a nineteen-year-old enlistee in the United States Air Force. The year was 1969. Since then I have repeated that oath on several occasions. Once when I was commissioned into the Illinois Army National Guard. Again, when I took command of the Illinois Army and Air National Guard and was promoted to Major General. Yet again, seven years later, after retiring from the National Guard, I swore that allegiance as a newly elected United States Congressman.
Adherence to those words has guided my adult life and shaped the decisions I have made as a military leader, as an elected official, and as an informed citizen of our great nation.
Unfortunately, today too many people allow political partisanship and its accompanying gamesmanship to override those words. Politicians openly lie in an attempt to gain political advantage. Cable news media distorts, manipulates, and disregards facts to influence voters. Social media in the pursuit of profits allows, indeed encourages, dissemination of rumor, innuendo, and conspiracies.
Most of us in the middle are disregarded by the far right and far left of the political discourse. Our founding fathers disdained political parties. Disdained them for good reason. Political parties cause people to focus on the team, not the issues.
The preamble to the Constitution states:
“We the People of the United States, in Order 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, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Those words, the words that follow, and the amendments which have since been enacted, were drafted to follow through on the promise made in the Declaration of Independence:
“…all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”
I may be a St. Louis Cardinals fan, and you may be (God forbid!) a Yankees fan, but we are all Americans and my team is the United States of America. The rules of the game are contained in the Constitution. We are not perfect, but we will work, together, towards a more perfect union.
Bill Enyart is a former Adjutant General of the Illinois Army and Air National Guard and served in Congress from 2013-2015. He now hosts a podcast called “Reflections from the River” available at www.billenyart.com.
