- At some point in school, you are probably made to read our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Maybe you remember that famous declaration quote.

"All men are created equal," written by a guy who owned hundreds of slaves, or the preamble to the Constitution written by a guy who actually hated slavery.

These documents are well over 200 years old.

Reading them today in their antiquated language, they might seem boring.

But without them, the US might not exist.

Or if it still did, there's a chance we wouldn't be able to practice the religion we want, own a firearm, or have the right to a jury trial in disputes over as little as $20 in change.

Although Congress has since raised that amount to $75,000, so your dream of suing your roommate over the Postmates order he said he'd split is dead, unless it was a lot of wings.

But to take a bird's eye view, according to the 2024 Cato Institute July 4th survey, a full third of young Americans don't know the Declaration of Independence led to the American Revolution.

And according to the Annenberg Constitution Day Civic Survey, just 7% of Americans can name all five First Amendment rights, while 21% of us can't name any.

If this many Americans don't know why we fought for independence or the rights we gained as a result of it, are we at risk of forgetting what makes us special in the first place?

Or put another way, do those founding documents that established our independence and rights still matter today?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, he was 33, a millennial.

Some of the documents, words became quite famous, like "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," or John Hancock's massively large signature.

But if you think about it, the declaration is just a list of complaints about one's partner.

It's kind of a breakup letter.

So who better to evaluate these grievances than a licensed marriage therapist?

Before I read the grievances in the Declaration of Independence, there are 27 grievances.

- Okay.

- When you see couples, do people come in with lists of grievances about the other person?

- Sometimes, yeah.

- Can I give you a couple example grievances and you tell me if you think this is something that can be rectified or if it's something that's a relationship.

- Sounds good.

Sounds good.

- Alright, so one is making somebody wait on purpose.

Keeping an inconvenient schedule.

So like if somebody wants to meet up, you purposely make them meet up at weird times and weird places.

- Remember, it takes two to make the relationship work.

So it does sound like, you know, this person isn't really fully committed.

- Yeah, it's a whole country.

- Yeah.

- All right, these are gonna get worse.

- Okay.

- Not letting somebody socialize with friends, not letting people who are currently in England come over to the United States.

- Well, controlling, right?

Possessive.

- What about forcing members of the military to live with them?

- I think every relationship, sometimes you're the leader, sometimes you're the follower.

So sometimes I guess it goes back and forth.

It's only, I think, gets dysfunctional if someone only wants to control.

And the control is an addiction, you know, we can't really control, we can inspire and encourage.

- What about kidnapping?

- In what way?

- Kidnapping somebody, bringing them to stay on trial for fake crimes.

- Some clients that were kidnapped by Pablo Escobar in Columbia.

- Are you serious?

- Yeah.

- I have one more question.

What's your piece of advice to people here in the United States today who are constantly fighting with themselves on social media, fighting with each other?

- Well, I think to connect, to listen, maybe, you know, encourage people to meditate, but it's to sort of hang out with yourself, get to know the inner world, like I think we're so consumed about out here, but we're not really listening to inside.

And that's where I think getting in touch with the love that's within us.

I think we're all pieces of love as unique as our thumbprint, and I think we gotta get in touch with that and take our action from that.

- So fix ourselves and fix the country?

The Constitution, as we covered in Episode 10, our founders originally tried to repair the Articles of Confederation, but ended up writing a whole new charter, the Constitution.

So what are the big things that document established?

Well, instead of one person having all the power like a king or a toxic boyfriend, the power was split between three branches: Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, a throuple that worked.

And this separation of powers was reinforced by checks and balances between the branches, where each one has some leverage over the other two.

Like, Congress can impeach and remove the President and judges.

The President can veto a bill passed by Congress and chooses who's on the Supreme Court.

And the Supreme Court can decide what Congress's laws mean and which executive orders from the president are or aren't Constitutional.

It can even strike those unconstitutional laws and executive orders down.

Although that power isn't mentioned in the Constitution, instead, the document lets the Supreme Court interpret it, and the justices interpreted it to give them that power, which is actually pretty clever.

Let's see.

Throuple long last compromise.

The dudes who wrote the Constitution had conflicting ideas, like, should each state get an equal number of representatives to Congress or a number of proportional to each state's population?

How about both?

Should everyone be allowed to vote or just some people?

Well, let's let each state decide, and should an enslaved person count as a single person for the purpose of counting the population to determine how many Congress people and electoral votes state gets, or should an enslaved person not count at all?

How about meet in the middle at three-fifths of a person?

I didn't say they were good compromises, but those compromises and many others, the electoral college, limits on federal power are the reason the Constitution was ratified at all.

And the changes we've made to it are why it's lasted for 237 years.

Even after our biggest fight, we added amendments to make things more fair.

A ban on slavery, citizenship and legal protections for former slaves, voting rights protections for African Americans, although in practice it just applied to men.

And the amendments that came after that continued to make things more fair.

Establishing income tax; allowing the wealthy to shoulder more of the tax burden, letting you and I choose our US senators, not state lawmakers.

Voting rights protections for women, limiting a President to being elected to two terms max, allowing DC to have electoral votes, banning hold taxes, which African Americans had to pay in the South, and recent immigrants had to pay in the North in order to vote.

Voting rights protections for people 18 and up.

Before then, the voting in almost every state was 21.

But today we're obviously increasingly divided.

A lot of that is driven by how we get our news.

We don't all see the same information online, certainly not in our social media feeds, which means it's not just our opinions that differ anymore, it's our understanding of what is and isn't true.

With each passing day, we share less of a common perception of reality.

On top of that, when it comes to national institutions like Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, the media, the banks, the military, our trust in them is at some of the lowest levels ever.

It's hard to stay united when distrust, confusion, and animosity keep ticking up.

So what do we do?

Are we headed for a breakup after 250 years?

How do we fix our relationship with us?

You know, I find it odd that 2/3 of people born in America can't pass the US citizenship test, which 100% of legal immigrants must pass to become naturalized citizens.

More than a century ago, my great grandparents came here from England, Ireland, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine.

They didn't share a religion, certainly not a language, but they all ended up in the same place, right over there.

Ellis Island.

They sailed across the Atlantic Ocean at great personal risk to make a better life for themselves, their kids, their grandkids, and their great grandkids.

Let's be honest, America isn't perfect.

Our founders knew that, and they said so at the very top of the Constitution.

But we are free, thanks to that document, to say and write what we want, to practice our preferred religion, to vote for the leaders we like and yell at the ones we don't.

With very few restrictions, we can pretty much live how we like.

That is not something every other country shares.

America has gone through periods of instability, turmoil, even darkness.

But somehow, for 249 years, we haven't just endured, we've improved.

The reason these documents in their history matter is because they're both a gift and a map.

They give us rights and freedoms, but they also show us where we've been, or really what we've been through.

They're proof that we can navigate rough waters.

If we use them and understand them, they can help us write the ship.

I hope these episodes have taught you something.

I've certainly learned a lot in making them.

And even though we usually can find civics class to one semester at some point between kindergarten and 12th grade, it doesn't have to end there.

From museums, historical sites, and books to podcasts, social media, and yes, even 12 minute YouTube videos, we have more resources at our fingertips than ever.

I hope we use it wisely.

I'm Ben Sheehan, and it's been a pleasure having you.