Opinion: If teenagers understand boundaries, rights of others, why can't adult lawmakers?

William Lee Sease says this nation must be truthful about its exceptionalities as well as its warts.
William Lee Sease says this nation must be truthful about its exceptionalities as well as its warts.
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Back in 1983, my wife Anna and I were asked to come to a camp in Western North Carolina to oversee an area of the camp for the month of July. We lived in Minnesota at the time and had a significant relationship with the camp that began with our college days when we were camp counselors for the camp. This time, the director wanted us there to specifically supervise the senior high school campers. These campers had been camp friends going back to their elementary years. These close relationships coupled with the tendency of teenagers to resist authority, made this group a challenge for the camp staff, as well as the other 400-plus guests. We were trusted to be able to reign in this group.

Our first move with this group of 100 or more 14- to 17-year-olds was to gather them in a meeting and split them into focus groups with a camp counselor leading each group. We told them that the purpose of the meeting was to develop community rules for the group to take responsibility and enforce. The first reports were a list of do’s and don’ts to which we said, “Not good enough.” We wanted concepts that provided guidance for a group of teenagers living together as a community. Soon words such as ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’ began to surface. The focus groups gradually began to dissolve, evolving into a large group discussion with words leading to other words and statements leading to other statements. In the final analysis, this group of teenagers came up with one rule: “My boundaries end where the rights of others begin.” Now it would be hard to come up with a more comprehensive rule than this one to guide community life.

About 250 years ago, King George of England was forcing the colonists to make similar considerations. In the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress pinned, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …”

A little over a decade later some of these same men, along with additional delegates from the represented states drafted the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution that read, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Some 70 years later, Abraham Lincoln summed up these efforts with his Gettysburg address that ended with, “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The 14th amendment in part says, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Our governing laws are not limited to do’s and don’ts but are guided by principles as Lincoln laid out in his Gettysburg Address.

Now it appears that we have a majority in the U.S. Supreme Court and a majority in a major political party that rejects this notion. Their approach to our governing principles are much more simplistic. For example, if specific rights are not explicitly spelled out in the constitution, then those rights do not exist. Such literal interpretations of the constitution lack the imagination that I envision guided the Founding Ffathers and Abraham Lincoln.

Those young folks demonstrated substantially more imagination and creativity than what is coming from some members of the Supreme Court and the current Republican Party.

‘My boundaries end where the rights of others begin.’ A group of young people with the proper guidance demonstrated a substantially broader understating of life’s circumstances than the adults elected to safeguard the welfare of this nation. The insights and deliberations of teenagers actually make Congress and the Supreme Court look silly. That is immensely sad.

William Lee Sease, a Burnsville resident, is author of "Holy Crap!!! Is Anyone Thinking About the Children?"

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: If teens understand boundaries, rights, why can't lawmakers?