Chris Graham: America, you need to get over yourselves

Poll: 71 percent think signers of the Declaration of Independence would not be happy with how America has turned out.

Seriously – five in seven of you honestly think this?

So the founders would be wicked pissed that the country they forged out of a group of former British colonies was able to produce and continues to build on wealth never before seen in human history.

Wow.

And that their creation led efforts – twice – to fight back tyranny in world wars in the 20^th century.

Or maybe you’re thinking that the founders don’t like that we reversed course on slavery and the subjugation of women and those who don’t own real estate. Me, I’d like to think that they would’ve long since come around on that, but maybe that’s just me.

My guess is that many of you in the five-of-seven group have issue with the way the Constitution is applied to political life. I also guess that many of you who hold this view haven’t done much more than a rudimentary review of how our Constitution was forged. News flash: It was an endless series of political compromises, not something handed down on high from God in verbatim form.

The founders expected their document to be amended. Hell, they were the ones who wrote the Bill of Rights, which, if you can comprehend this, was a series of amendments to the document that they themselves had just produced.

There was plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Constitution even in the day of the founders. That sense of unease lingered on for decades and spilled over into an actual war (the so-called Civil War), which is still being fought in certain parts of the country (most recently, the block of prime D.C. real estate encompassing the U.S. Supreme Court, in its ruling on the Voting Rights Act).

It’s OK for us all to argue over how to best devise public policies and allocate resources and the rest. That’s what makes representative democracy great. We all have a right to provide input and not take yes or no or maybe so for an answer.

That said, this suggestion on the part of a supermajority of you that our founders wouldn’t be proud of what we’ve become – America, you need to get over yourselves, really, truly.