It’s disturbing to think how a country whose government requires all of its citizens to attend school until the age of 18, don’t know the basic rules put down by said government. I’m proud to say that even though my high school was very poorly funded, they made sure we all read the Bill of Rights at least once. Let’s just cross our fingers and hope that those too jaded to care about our right to free speech also don’t care enough to vote.

Reminds me of a casual conversation I was having with a colleague in which I mentioned that the Bill of Rights provided some protection for everybody, even middle-aged-white-guys-from-Wisconsin. He wasnt sure. I reminded him that he had guns, and I wasnt required to go to church on Sunday.

The light bulb did go on. For that I give thanks (pun intended).

OK, so I’m not completely clear on the specific chain of events (thus calling into question everything I post…). I’m pretty sure this all started because my Mom had takent to reading the Bill of Rights to some of her friends because they clearly didn’t know what it said. (Thus suggesting that the problems in the Knight report aren’t limited to kids, but also extend to educated, upper-middle class adults.) Now that Our Resident Alien brings it up, though, I’m not sure whose idea it was to read the Bill as part of our Thanksgiving celebrations. We (mostly WeatherGirl) did write a cool letter to the paper, though, which it might be fun to reprint if we can find a copy. There wasn’t much response to it, though, so I’m not convinced we changed the world, but it was still worth the try :-).

I like the idea of including some relevant highlights of the Magna Carta in the event, since it’s obviously a crucial pre-cursor to important parts of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. I should also point out that the Wikipedia article on the U.S. Bill of Rights (which I forgot to link to above) is quite useful for this sort of activity. Their more general article on “Bill of Rights” is also useful and has pointers to articles on number of related documents, including the Magna Carta, the Virginia Bill of Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I seem to remember that this resident space alien was the one who had the idea of reading the US Bill of Rights at our UN-thanksgiving meal. We even wrote a letter to the editor encouraging our neighbours to do something similar.

We’ll do the same this year. Perhaps we should add Magna Carta to the mix too?