You Had One Job — United States of America — One F*cking Job!

Two Centuries In: Has America Lived Up to Its Preamble?

Erik Blair
3 min readOct 6, 2023

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In the grand narrative of America, the nation was handed a singular job description, etched not on paper, but on the tapestry of hope and the spirit of revolution.

This job was concisely laid out in the Preamble to its Constitution: to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Remember those foundational narratives instilled in us during our formative years? That America was a land with a purpose, anointed with a “Manifest Destiny” and rooted in the conviction that “anything is possible”. Our ethos resonated with “yes, we can” and embodied the grit of “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps”. After all, wasn’t the U.S. heralded as the “Land of Opportunity”, promising us the allure of the “American Dream”?

Yet, with such boundless promise and the capacity to surmount any challenge, how have two centuries passed with our current state as testament? Media’s portrayal of progress seems to hinge on comparing our status to the worst situations globally or in politics, with the prevailing sentiment being, “at least we’re…

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