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[Appalachian Spring, Doppia Movimento by Copland plays]
[Isaac James]: The Constitution of the United States means, means a lot.
It means basically that, you know, I’m a free man. You know, I’m an American.
It means that I have, I have life, liberty, the pursuit of all who threaten mine and my family’s happiness.
It, there’s, I wouldn’t say that every, that I agree with everything that’s on it because we don’t really follow suit with everything that’s on it, but I do agree with the most part what it stood for, what it was written for.
At the beginning it was written for, for certain, for certain purposes and certain causes because we were trying to win our independence.
And we won that independence but we got away from a lot of those principles that, that it was written for.
But… as a military man… I’m sworn to defend the Constitution and… I’d prefer not to live in any other country but America because we have a constitution that states what it does.
I believe that we have, that we’re on the, we’re on the right track to get back to what the Constitution was, was based on, but I feel we have a way to go.
But the Constitution means to me everything that I stand for: my daughter, my, my entire family, and why I wear this uniform is because of the Constitution.
[Ariana Dildine]: The Constitution to me means that I have the freedom to live in a country where I can express myself in any way that I can, particularly religiously.
I have the freedom to practice my Christian religion and it also means that the people around me have freedom to express themselves through other religions, through writing, through any way that they feel.
And it also gives us - it sets us apart from other countries in the world where we have liberty and free education, which is really important.
[Eric Cowan]: I think the Constitution is kind of a representation of the, the people of the U.S. and our ideas and rules kind of and it’s a reflection of that greatness.
[Interviewer]: Great, anything else to add?
[Eric]: Oh yeah, and it also kind of, it shows how far we’ve come in the last three hundred years and how we started without kind of freedom of speech and stuff and now how that’s one of the biggest rights and obviously the first amendment.
And yeah, and it, the Constitution just kind of symbolizes how we created a government and how the government functions pretty well in my opinion.
Obviously it’s corrupt, but it functions still.
[Christopher Herbert]: The Constitution means to me freedom mostly, like freedom from, freedom to do whatever we want as long as it’s within our rights, not violating anybody other, anybody else’s rights.
So that’s pretty much it.
[Max Sussman]: The Constitution was a really, really good idea, like two hundred fifty years ago and it worked really well.
And it’s the framework of our country, how things should work.
We should keep it around because it’s been doing pretty good compared to a lot of other constitutions.
[Bethany Holland]: For me it means freedom to be who I am and live the way I want to without the government telling me what to do or how to live and giving me the rights that, you know, a lot of people don’t have in other, other places around the world.
Some of my favorite rights, I guess, are the right to practice my beliefs and religions and my freedom of speech and, yeah, I think there’s like a lot of unknown, like unspoken freedoms that we have that aren’t even written in the Constitution.
So I really, I feel privileged to, you know, be in a country that has a constitution that tells us, you know, we can live this, we can live however we want.
We don’t have to be, you know, tied down to what the government says we have to do or look like, like a lot of other people are kind of stuck in that.
[Julian Babbitt]: The Constitution means to me basically, it’s the foundation of rights for our country.
It’s, enumerates the powers that the federal government has and those powers which are not delineated were left to the states.
And I think that’s, you know, kind of the, the meat and potatoes as far as the Constitution is concerned, that the federal government is trying to encroach so much, especially in these times, as far as taking more control of the personal lives of citizens, whether it be through healthcare or regulation, higher taxation, all sorts of government control.
And you know, from the first amendment, freedom of speech, to the second amendment, the right to bear arms; those are all absolutely essential rights for our citizens.
I think that they’re, they’re under attack in this day and age. They’re marginalized and they’re trying to be represented as, you know, not meaning what they truly do mean.
A lot of people, you know, when they think of the second amendment, it doesn’t mean, you know, the right to own a handgun.
Well, it does. I think the second amendment says that you have the right to own a gun and the right to protect yourself.
So that’s just an example of how I think the Constitution is being, you know, perverted and being interpreted incorrectly.
And I think it’s incumbent upon students and the community as whole to really understand what the Constitution says and to promote the original meaning, so.