Sept. 17 marks Constitution Day in the United States, a day to celebrate the landmark signing of the U.S. Constitution. The day also functions as Citizenship Day, which celebrates those who are citizens of the U.S.
With immigration and the nature of citizenship being highly emotional topics recently, I think we should be more thoughtful when celebrating our own freedom. We need to stop and think about how both everyday people and the government can better help out those who are struggling to gain citizenship.
It’s easy for the people who were born naturalized citizens to assume what citizenship means to others. Far too often, we as a nation choose to use the holidays meant to honor the history and culture of America to celebrate nationalism.
At its best, America has always been inclusive of all cultures and ways of life, a haven of diversity. Even though the United States has not always done its best to live up to the noble ideas written in the articles, the Constitution itself was made to uphold this idea.
The Founding Fathers understood that inclusion was a pillar of the new nation they were creating. I find it ironic that some people wouldn’t think about this when celebrating Independence Day or Constitution Day.
With the way the current administration has handled the immigration issue, it is important to be more thoughtful of how we view the constitution’s importance to our country. Too many people use the constitution to further their own political beliefs while ignoring what the document represents at its core.
The difficulty of immigration is a very complex and difficult issue that isn’t going away any time soon, but I find it hard to celebrate Constitution Day when so many people in the government are ignoring what it was intended to stand for. They instead use it as the backbone for their own political agenda.
Sept. 17 is a special day in the history of the United States, but I think we should use it as a day to understand the history of the country and how we can better ourselves, instead of using it as a day to blindly celebrate the rights so many of us take for granted.
