More Perfect

“In order to form a more perfect union…”

We don’t spend a whole lot of time discussing that part of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, do we? It almost sounds like a flowery bit of rhetorical fluff, doesn’t it?  

When I was growing up, the focus of constitutional lessons usually breezed right past the entire preamble, let alone this one clause. Even into college studies, lectures were much more likely to dive into defining “we the people” or “general welfare.” In fact, it wasn’t until I became a Marine Officer that this particular phrase really stuck out to me.

You see, “in order to” is an incredibly common phrase to those of us who have served in uniform. That small phrase is what we use to communicate an idea known as commander’s intent. In those three words, we are highlighting to our subordinates the why behind our orders.

Communicating that why, or purpose, is absolutely vital in military orders. Military operations exist in chaos. The fog of battle often separates commanders and their troops. Communications systems can fail. Units disperse and may lose contact with each other (sometimes by design, often by circumstance). Leaders can be injured or killed, and in moment’s notice it falls to subordinates to press forward to accomplish the objective of that mission. How does that next rung down the leadership ladder know what to do in this chaos? Commander’s intent.

So, what does that matter to the framers of the constitution?

They’ve charged us with a just cause, to be pursued in the context of an infinite game. They didn’t frame their why as some set of tangible, clearly defined deliverables. Rather, they’ve called us to perpetuate their revolutionary spirit and further this grand experiment in self-governance.

What exactly does a more perfect union look like? How do we strive toward promoting general welfare? It took generations for us to just establish the modern court system, balanced between federal and state courts and overlapping jurisdictions. Is that the establishment of justice?  

Each of us honors their call to action when we participate in the system our founding fathers created. The body of the constitution, and its subsequent amendments, gives us a framework, the how of our system. But, in my opinion, we need to spend a great deal more time as a society diving into the preamble.

There’s no question that our nation is in the midst of turmoil. In a sense, we are operating in our own fog of battle. Our neighbors are struggling. Some are experiencing a new set of challenges while swaths of our citizenry continue to push against an ocean of issues that have been with us since before our nation’s founding.

But here’s the beauty of the preamble – we have a pretty simple commander’s intent: show up and press on.

We know that our generation, like all those before us, is charged to strive toward more. Our intent is simple and magnificent all at once: to keep getting better. We innovate, we toil, we build toward compromise, and we help bend the arc of history toward justice.

You may not have known that today is Constitution Day in these still United States. It’s easy to miss. We make a grand affair of celebrating the declaration of our independence. But I hope today you take a moment to consider the intent of our constitution’s framers. Our forefathers did so much more than send a press release to declare they were going to strike out on their own.

In signing the Declaration of Independence, the revolutionary generation pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for an ideal – that a nation could be forged from limitless cultures and be established to continually pursue more. Then, in framing the Constitution more than a decade later, our founders committed themselves, our generation, and all those still to come to that same revolutionary ideal.

Those framers didn’t give us the “how”, they communicated an intent to us that remains timeless in its significance and daunting in its challenge. Let’s take it on.