Congress wasn’t intentionally setting out to write a Strategic Plan for the United States, but that’s what the Founding Fathers did in the preamble to the Constitution, only they didn’t have our vocabulary.

They envisioned a more perfect union than what they had.  It would require that they:

  • establish justice

  • ensure domestic tranquility

  • provide for the common defense

  • promote the general welfare

  • secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

They could not know of the future complexities created by a growing population inhabiting a large and varied land area with 50 states, and of the many inventions that would transform life as they knew it.  Presumably, they did not imagine widespread unemployment or income/asset inequality or legislated minimum wages or a ban on child labor. 

Of course their thinking was heavily influenced by their immediate problems, such as quartering of soldiers and the like, going on to those discovered later, such as black and female suffrage.  (They were keenly aware of slavery.)  They knew that the union was imperfect.  We can look at it now and see how we measure up.

Establishment of justice was soon spelled out in amendments concerning rights to a fair trial, posting bail, fines, and cruel and unusual punishments.  They improved on the Magna Carta by inventing tripartite government.  The Miranda ruling fits well.  Civil versus military trials for alleged enemies are still a matter of dispute.

Have we insured domestic tranquility?  With our high murder rates, particularly in certain states and within certain neighborhoods of some cities, perhaps not.  However, peaceable demonstrations are not riots, rebellions, or revolutions.  Pollsters asking whether one feels the country is headed in the right direction get large numbers of negative responses.  Many of those may be the result of personal anxiety about needing or keeping a job as well as by an uneasy and divided world.  If the country were headed in the right direction, goes the thinking, I would have a good job, there would be no nuclear threats, and our climate would remain just as it has been in my lifetime.

Providing for the common defense was an obvious necessity, and it still is.  But no one could foretell that it would include bodily searches at airports or new means of invading privacy, with or without warrants.

Promoting the general welfare is a catch-all phrase.  Its significance is in the word “general,” implying that the welfare of the entire citizenry is a concern of all of us.  Do most Americans seriously want to promote the welfare of everyone? Do they even imagine that if more of us were better educated and more productive citizens, all would benefit? If Congress attempted to produce an agreement by consensus, it might come out as a statement about personal responsibility.  The issue of facilitating higher education for illegal immigrants, recently signed into law in California, is perhaps the sharpest line of division.  Are we thinking of what individual students may deserve or of producing a more educated populace, the benefits of which might not be evident for a generation or two?

As Congress struggles over debt and deficit and whether to tax the rich or cut Social Security and Medicare, it probably doesn’t want to think of the General Welfare clause in the Constitution.  And calling the preamble to the Constitution a strategic plan would imply a long-range outlook that is not common today. Are we able to define the kind of world we’d like our posterity to inhabit?

Eugenie Beal is on the board of the Boston Natural Areas Network, which she helped found in 1977, and a longtime member of the Friends of the Public Garden. She was the first chairwoman of the Boston Conservation Commission, in the 1970s, and the first director of the Boston Environment Department.