Independence Day!

Another Fourth of July, gone. It isn't necessary to bore you with the details of what happened on campus. The libraries were all closed (depriving me of my study spaces), there was a lot of loud music, and there were fireworks before I went to bed last night. Very fun stuff. I also went swimming in the Connecticut River for about an hour, which was very cool. Perfect water temperature near the surface, COLD water at the two feet level. But I don't want to bore you...

I just read an article in the New Yorker about how little we, as a country, know about our constitution, and indeed, the structure of our government. A great majority of people, for instance, have never read the Constitution. It quoted John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, misquoting the Preamble of the Constitution while holding a pocket copy of it. He substituted it with the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Instead of saying "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union..." he said "we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal..."

This give you a lot of confidence on who is running our government, no?

But the truth is, despite my government major and my public policy minor, even I haven't read the Constitution in its entirety. Neither have a lot of you. And while this isn't the end of the world, I think that I'm going to remedy this problem. On this, the most patriotic of days. It's the least I can do for a document that established one of the richest, freest, and most powerful nations that the world has ever seen.