A bit "unpatriotic," but here goes

Whenever a flame war rages on a message board or in the comments section of a newspaper article or column, someone will invariably invoke the wise, sagacious advice or quote of a Founding Father, and quote it as if it was scripture.

This, I don't understand at all.

I understand that the Founding Fathers are amazing people. They cobbled together a very flexible and revolutionary document for its time, which has been used as a standard for many other constitutions in democratic countries. It has served our country well, and it provides a very strict rule of law which our government should and ought to follow and provides a stable form of democratic government with a little bit more gridlock than a parliamentary government, but that's because most of the Founding Fathers distrusted strong central governments as a whole.

However, the one great genius of the Constitution is the fact that it can be amended.

Observe, for example, how the infamous 3/5 rule for black people is now replaced by an amendment that gives full suffrage to any race (and another one for women). Notice that the basic freedoms which many Americans hold dear are in the Bill of Rights, or, in other words, the first ten amendments of the Constitution. Behold the ability of the Constitution to attempt social engineering with Prohibition, and then its ability to stabilize itself after it didn't work by popular vote. It is obvious that the real driving power behind the Constitution and the United States of America is its resiliency, flexibility and ability to adapt to the changing circumstances around her.

So why do we continue to quote the Founding Fathers as if they were scripture? Priceless as their contributions to this country were, and wise and universal as some of their sayings are, they cannot be held as immutable, immovable deities of government and policy.

For example, George Washington recommends we stay out of foreign entanglements. At the moment, it was very wise. The United States was a fledgling republic, born in backwoods wilderness and were seen as perfect targets of manipulation, or a more subtle form of cultural colonization, by the two rival superpowers of the world at the time - Great Britain and France. Making treaties hastily with these powers could draw America into situations that were not beneficial and even actively harmful for her security. Play it safe, ol' Georgie says, and keep the ocean between us and them. Then we can grow strong without the interference of conniving nations.

But this is hardly the turn of the 18th century, right before the 1800s. We are more than two centuries over, with the turn of the 2000s, a world where increased globalization and connectivity with the world greatly enhances our country. Few people pause to realize that bananas come from Latin America, that our cellphones and computers are designed in Japan and manufactured in China, and that people naively buy water from the island of Fiji. Without global treaties, trade agreements and connections with other countries, we would lose all of our tropical fruit and the ability to buy vegetables year round, despite the fact they are out of season. We would have to make most of our own electronic gadgetry, and other everyday commodities we usually import.

And we are no longer a fledgling republic needing shielding from predatory empires. We are a superpower of our own right (and an empire, some would accuse), and while unwise agreements and entanglements are poor whatever time period you're in, to ignore the world with so much of the world's resources at our disposal would be ethically and morally wrong, as well as hurt our ability to economically help our business partners, and thus ourselves.

Again, I understand that the Founding Fathers were wise. But they are not God. It bugs me when people always invariably say, "What did Thomas Jefferson really mean when he wrote this?" Or John Adams or James Madison, for that matter. The reality is, it doesn't matter. Wise and forward thinking as they were, Jefferson would have no ability to conceive the technological advances of television and radio, internet and digital broadcast, of cars and planes and trains and nuclear power and nationwide electrical grids. Even the idea of the telegraph would have blown his mind away when we was thinking about the Constitution. In his time, it took months to get news from England; I can download the UK's newspaper The Guardian in seconds.

The Founding Fathers at the time never heard of communism, had no idea of the impact of labor unions, of increased transportation, travel and communication; they had never heard of automatic weapons, of the morning after pill, of internet pornography and how it applies to free speech. They couldn't fathom that homosexuals would someday demand the same rights for marrying or that we might actually run out of environmental resources in such a vast continent. Most of them felt women and Africans were inferior, that Arabs and Native Americans were savages, that infecting blankets with smallpox and giving them to villages of people we don't like were probably okay (and an effective form of warfare). They thought the British were oppressive ninnies (not knowing they would someday become one of our greatest allies), had no idea where to even begin understanding what a vaccine does or that we can transfer information at high speeds with electricity.

Someone can show statistics, empirical proof of a certain subject, why we should legislate a certain bill or how a certain policy would most effectively work. Never mind that those damn European liberal hippie countries with their universal health care have better life expectancies than America - the Founding Fathers said small government no matter what is the best way to go and that's that! Forget the fact that we haven't had an invasion on our soil for centuries and that the United States Army causes state run militias for this point in time obsolete - the 2nd Amendment is set in stone (reality check: It's not. It can be amended at any time) and the Founding Fathers by golly said we need guns so don't even question our gun policies!

It is silly, a certain type of bigotry and near sightedness, akin to a religious cult, where people cannot consider ideas contrary to those of the Founding Fathers, despite the fact that the Founding Fathers have been dead for many a decade and would never have been able to imagine a world such as ours. They would have labeled it science fiction - except they didn't even have that genre of literature when they were alive.

Religions and their scripture I can understand, though it's healthy to critically question your faith and God (or any form of deity you believe in) to mature and develop your faith, but history has shown the Founding Fathers to be brilliant, yet just as flawed, mere mortals, not even gods. Last I have checked, Hamilton did not gain godhood and ascend to his golden throne, declaring the Federalist Papers as sola scriptura (though there probably easily could be a religious group surrounding that, see also: Fundamentalist Utah Mormons).

The Founding Fathers are not perfect, and some of their ideas are (gasp!) outdated. But it's all right, because America thrives on change and adaptation. While we should respect our past, let's not get shackled down with it. We should constantly be thinking and re-inventing ourselves so that we can perform to our utmost greatest now and in the future. The Founding Fathers are great; however, they are not a Magic 8 Ball into the future. The world we live in would make their head spin. But we shouldn't let it make us lose our footing either because we keep turning to the past to answer questions in the future that they had no way of even conceiving.