Protection Imperative
America’s founding documents largely avoided attaching adjectives to the concept of “Citizen.” They established broad philosophical principles centered on liberty, personal rights, and self-determination without attempting to divide citizenship into preferred categories. For their time, the idea was radical: a nation built more on shared principles than on shared bloodlines.
Our founders were imperfect people, constrained by the limits and prejudices of their era. Yet many of their aspirations remain deeply human and recognizable today. They sought the freedom to shape their own lives, raise their families safely, worship as they chose, speak openly, and pursue opportunity without a domineering central authority. They envisioned a country driven not by inherited class, tribe, bloodline, or title, but by the ambitions and determination of its citizens.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights speak largely in universal terms: citizens, persons, and the people. The documents themselves are far more neutral than many who later interpreted and enforced them.
The problem has rarely been the principles. It has been people; it is us, the “Citizens.”
Human beings instinctively protect power once they possess it. They create social and political adjectives around the word “Citizen” to determine who fully belongs, who deserves influence, whose rights matter more, and whose freedoms may be limited. Throughout history, those in power have repeatedly narrowed broad constitutional principles through discrimination, exclusion, fear, and tribal identity.
That reality is precisely why federal and state protections became necessary. The Constitution may aspire toward color-blind liberty; the administration of those principles has often fallen short. Courts and lawmakers must continually wrestle with that contradiction while remaining anchored in the original promise of equal citizenship under the law.
The easy path is to turn a blind eye to humankind’s tendencies. The hard path, but the right one, is to address, restrain, and retrain them and to uphold the standards of our original foundations.
Citizenship carries enormous responsibility and accountability. It also carries extraordinary freedom. Both weaken the moment adjectives become more important than the word “Citizen” itself. NeverFearTheDream simplebender.com
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