Nat Hentoff’s book Living the Bill of Rights is 27 years old, and it needs an update.
It seems to be a Rule of the Cosmos that every generation must come to a new understanding of these rights. People must find that understanding for themselves.
Hentoff says that Justice William Brennan of the Supreme Court told him that the Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of Americans.
“But you’ve got to tell the stories,” Justice Brennan said. “It’s not enough to tell them what their rights and liberties are. They need to know — and this will get them interested — how these American liberties were won, and what it takes to keep them alive.
“And tell them,” Brennan continued, “about the actual people out there now who are not afraid to fight to keep on being free Americans.”
I think Hentoff and Brennan were right: People need to hear stories.
In a democracy, the people are in charge of their government — not the other way around. In delegating authority to their representatives, the people don’t surrender their right to know what their representatives are doing. The people don’t surrender their right to disagree and dissent. The people don’t surrender their right to jerk the chain of arrogant usurpers and bring them to heel within the guidelines set by the Constitution.
These fundamental rights come off the page into American life when people, generation after generation, find ways to curb the usurpers.
I think Hentoff’s book needs an update, and I think Anthony Griffin, who appeared in these notes yesterday, would be just the person to do it.
In the meantime, those of us who have stories about earlier battles should tell them to the younger people who are fighting today. The republic is in heavy seas, but in the younger generation of dissenters, I see real intelligence, real courage. The situation is far from hopeless.
• Source: Nat Hentoff, Living the Bill of Rights: How to Be an Authentic American; New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1998, p. xv.
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