Constitutional or Spiritual Crisis?

There is much talk among media pundits these days about a constitutional crisis and for good reason.  In political science, a constitutional crisis is “a problem or conflict in the function of government that the constitution or other fundamental law is perceived to be unable to resolve.”  There are many variations, but typically, constitutional crises happen when there are severe conflicts between the different branches of government and/or conflicts among various factions within society.  The secession of seven Southern states in 1861 was a constitutional crisis. The Watergate scandal (1972-1974) became a constitutional crisis when Nixon and his staff obstructed investigations into their political activities.  Are we now engaged in a constitutional crisis?  I think so.  However, there is another underlying crisis going on that has created the constitutional one, which we tend to ignore.  I suppose we ignore it because it involves us—not Republicans, Democrats, President, Congress, etc.,—but us:  me, you, and every Tom, Jane, Dick, Harry, and Sally.

“The malaise of the American spirit cannot be blamed on wrongheaded policies, inept administrations….The reasons are more fundamental…arising from the kind of people we have become…,” wrote a professor at Cornell University fifty years ago!  What kind of people have we become? (Or, maybe it can be said that we’ve always been the kind of people we are now).  Our whole world has changed and changed drastically over the past fifty years.  Have we? Our constitutional crisis now, as in the various constitutional crises of our history, are a result not of political leaders and administrations, but the result of a spiritual sickness in us—in the spirit of the American people.  

This spiritual crisis has to do with the loss of our sense of morality and justice:  from (if ever it were true) “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”—to—“Build a wall!”  And the “wall” is more important than building roads and bridges, more important than cleaning up our poisoned waters,  or resolving the problems of the inner cities, more important than our own people in poverty, and more important than those people who want to become our people.  That is a spiritual crisis—not a constitutional one.  It has to do with our rationality, our decency, our consciences, and our humanness.