It is no accident that Constitution Day is also Citizenship Day. September 17, 1787 a majority (39 of the 55) of those delegates assembled in Philadelphia signed the Constitution. Those that agreed intended for the legislatures of the then 13 states to add their affirmations and ratify the document into force. With New Hampshire's ratification in June 21, 1788 a fledgling experiment in democracy was formed as a constitutional republic.
It is the "gravity" of our Constitution that collects us, not a single president, or lurching legislature, or a pretentious bench. No state pledges allegiance when the "stars and stripes" are raised. Only citizens can make that pledge. We are made a nation by an agreement begun nearly 238 years ago and sustained by our adherence to the same.
William Randolph Hearst had a good idea and eventually his 3rd Sunday in May “I am an American Day” was moved by a joint resolution of the Senate and House of Representatives to September 17 and added the name “Citizenship Day.” Again, it is not a mistake or coercion to bind these two fundamentals together even acknowledging the 165 years it took to come about.
How else are we to celebrate citizenship? Seems obvious to me that idolizing a President is well short of our pledge. Just as short would be a rabid partisanship. The constitution doesn't appear to contemplate political parties. One wonders what sort of adherence to our founders' intentions is expressed by SCOTUS's decisions such as Citizens United (irony?) or Trump v. U.S. (more so?). Both decisions misconstrued citizenship as something less than that for which we hope in our celebration.
It's not just recent decisions, good or bad our history exposes a persistent unease with the practice of citizenship as foundational. I'll long muse about the relationship, if any between John Adam's absence on September 17 and his expressed preference for property as determinative for voting status. Suffrage has long suffered the proprietariness of propertied white men. Our contemporary fixation on "voter fraud" wants to appear interested in this particular -- can I say crowning? -- exercise of citizenship and ultimately shows itself captive to the skewed partisan ALEC orchestration of gerrymandered state legislatures. That's putting it mildly. What should be protected FOR all citizens to choose is instead restricted to sustain the newest version of those old preferences for Adam's landed gentry or worse.
I am advocating for a citizenship that has been hoped for more than practiced. Citizenship with its crown is meant to be the fuel of our constitutional republic, not family, property, race, sex, gender expression, privilege, or even merit. The resistance to that understanding is centuries old and brand new. It is causative not merely coincidental that demographic shifts are triggering the fears of propertied white men so used to voting as a majority. No wonder Trump is attacking birthright citizenship in his executive orders. No wonder Georgia criminalized handing out water to voters waiting for hours at the their limited polling stations. No wonder the escalator lapse of historic context that abuses asylum seekers and with calculating imprecision admits, "And some, I assume, are good people.” I can't see a tiki torch without Charlottesville's cries of "blood and soil" ringing in my ears.
The experiment of citizenship knows nor requires anything more than willfully admitted adherence to the Constitution. Until my fellow, privileged, white, men admit their deeply seated and unresolved fears of being treated as their fathers before them treated through law, and religion, and social institution, and business in public and in private anyone who was not of their "station" my advocacy for a practice of constitutional citizenship, better than Adams or Hearst imagined will not cease.
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