We're so used to the comforts of modern American living that we may be at risk of forgetting our roots.
You can't tell where we're going unless you know where you came from. This is what constitutional law is all about. We've been left in charge of the store, to fend for ourselves in a hostile world. Part of that hostility stems from the fact that others are starving while we flip switches to go on-line, or take a drive to the movies.
The coal mining disaster in Sago, W. VA, in the days following this New Years, has brought home to many how dependent we are on men forced to go deep into black mines to put food on the table for their kids, and to power the electric outlets in our homes. Men die to bring us power.
More men are dying to protect the oil supply in the Middle East. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, the first one, was brought on by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, to which we responded under the aegis of the United Nations. After 9-11-01, we've gone back, attacking the Al Qaeda training ground in Afghanistan, and Saddam because he posed as being a nuclear threat sufficiently to make us reason that we couldn't take a chance that he was bluffing.
Does this seem that we're fighting for our oil supply?
Let's say that at bottom, that's what we're doing. Is this bad?
Not by my lights. We'd fight for our coal mines. We'll fight to protect the worlds' oil supply, which is ours as well.
If you'd like to read an interesting book in which the author illustrates with examples his thesis that not everybody adapts to broad cultural change, see the new biography entitled John Brown, Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds (Knopf, 2005). Brown, who sparked the Civil War, was the last of the Puritans, as well as the first of the Abolitionists to resort to violence to free slaves, long before Lincoln thought it politic to attach the Civil War to that premise.
Brown was unable to adapt, in the early decades of the 19th century to the specialization demanded by a capitalist economy, in contradistinction to the earlier subsistence "Man on a Farm" economy representing the man who made or grew all that his family needed to survive.
What broad changes have been made that represented constitutional change? You've heard of the lords and the serfs of the feudal economy. For awhile it worked, especially if you were a landowning lord. It also worked if you were a serf and needed protection from rival warlords. You got to feed your family, but you had little in the way of liberty, as we understand the term.
After the Great Plague, in Europe, 1348, much of the labor supply in the cities died. Serfs were suddenly valuable. City merchants who survived, or sprang up, needed workers. They paid. Serfs finally had a place to go to sell their labor, to the cities.
You've heard of the Boston Commons. Do you know what it is? Today it is Boston's Central Park, or Golden Gate Park, a large area where people go for recreation. Originally, a commons was the area set aside in feudal villages for everybody in the community to allow their cattle and sheep to graze, while the owners tilled a strip of land assigned to them on the outskirts of town. The commons represented a form of communal living. No one 'owned' it as we define ownership, the right to exert exclusive domination and control of a thing, a person, or a defined area of ground, or even an idea.
Communal living has given way to what today we call the market economy. When I was a boy we called it 'capitalism.' The alternate choice was 'communism,' aka 'socialism,' headquartered in Moscow. We endured a five decade Cold War before emerging from that nuclear nightmare with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the world's great heroes in my lifetime (for not calling in the troops when the Berlin Wall came down).
In my lifetime, the U.S. has gone from the WWII economy of mining, manufacture, and smokestacks to one that manufactures intellectual property in industrial campuses, off-shoring the grunt work to India and points east. We have no more steel mills and shipyards. We do, however, continue to have coal mines, and miners. Half of the warmth of your home comes from coal, and miners such as the ones who died in W. VA. last week.