In America, our rulebook

“Stop playing games,” the agent replies testily. “There’s no rulebook here.”

After Hanks asks, the agent tells him — reluctantly — he’s of German extraction. Hanks responds by saying his people immigrated from Ireland.

“So what makes us both Americans?” Hanks says. “Only one thing. That rulebook. We call that rulebook the Constitution. It’s all that makes us both Americans.”

Middle of the night thoughts can unfurl themselves for all sorts of reasons, but the next morning this brief scene was still lingering in my mind. It wasn’t difficult to know why.

The Constitution has been much with me these days. I rarely read an article about our current state of political affairs without it referencing phrases like “due process” or “writ of habeas corpus.” Though I didn’t vote for President Trump, one result of his presidency has been my newfound interest in our Constitution, because so much that’s happened recently feels as if the rug of democracy has been swept from beneath my feet, and I feel suspended helplessly in midair over a dangerous and rocky landscape.

Each morning, I volunteer at the Burlingame Library. I help curate its bookstore — donated books that sell for a dollar or two, money that supports library programs.

Not long ago, someone dropped off a copy of “The History of the World in 1,000 Objects.” I casually leafed through pages filled with Mesopotamian bull’s heads, 18th century Chinese astronomical clocks, hanging scrolls depicting life in 7th century Japan.

Then on page 333, I came upon “The Supreme Law of the United States: The U.S. Constitution.”

The book explained how the 4,400-word Constitution is written on four sheets of parchment from the hide of an animal, and that its first three words, “We the People” are set off from the rest in giant, Gothic letters. Each page is 2 feet wide and more than 2 feet high, roughly the size of an 18th-century newspaper. It took four months in the Philadelphia summer of 1787 to deliberate and draft; it was debated in town meetings, in churches, in the streets. The country was true to this singular moment, abuzz with the urgency of inventing a new nation.

It’s one of the oldest written constitutions in the world, and the first, anywhere, to be submitted to the people for their approval, with necessary amendments still to come, like the abolishment of slavery and the voting rights of women.

Since it’s always creating anew what our liberties of individual freedom can mean in contemporary culture, it belongs intimately and personally to each one of us.

Whether segregation can exist in our schools, whether our federal health care law is constitutional, whether voting rights are shared equally by all, whether couples have the right to contraception, whether we have the right to same-sex unions, whether immigrants have the right of due process, whether we have a right to write or sing or wear what we choose.

In America, the author E.B. White wrote, “citizens are invited to write plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square.”

He also noted — many decades ago — that citizens are free to “enjoy education in all subjects without censorship … to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening … to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state.”

Because the Constitution is a living document and never settled, it’s always whispering this to me: that our nation is now and forever in the act of shaping itself, that no rights or liberties or laws should ever be taken for granted, and that the privileges under which we live, allowing us to seek the fulfillment of our personalities and beings, must perpetually and vigilantly be protected for all.

Written to “secure the blessings of liberty” this rulebook is our covenant with our country and with one another.

It binds us to our past, to who we are, to who we might be. It is the rock upon which our daily freedoms rest, and to be without it would be like a kind of death.

Mike Nagler taught for many years at Cañada College and was a member of the Burlingame Library Board and Foundation.