The Founders Would Like to Remind You They’ve Been Dead for Nearly Two Hundred Years

In the current era of hyper-partisanship, many have taken to using out-of-context quotes by us and asking what we would think of pretty much any political development.

With that in mind, we’d like to remind the American people that we are dead. In fact, we’ve been dead for nearly two hundred years. We are no longer capable of sentient thought. We feel this can’t be stressed enough.

You folks that think having to pay sales tax is an affront to the liberty we fought and died for seem to have forgotten that one of Washington’s first acts as president was to send the military to put down a protest against taxes on booze. So bear that in mind next time you’re cosplaying us and screaming about having to pay 10 percent on a pack of smokes.

When you all ask yourselves what we would think about the terms of service policies of tech companies, you should really be asking, would we even be able to have the capacity to process what the internet even is? We didn’t even have electricity back then. It took George Washington like a month just to travel down to South Carolina for a presidential visit.

The closest thing we had to Twitter was the town crier, and even they were getting their information long after it had initially been published.

By the way, since you now have Google, perhaps take a chance to look up the Sedition Acts, if you really want to know our opinion on free speech.

Now, we get that the bulk of the population is Christian, and you’re free to worship as such. But when we founded this country, you have to keep in mind that we were really only allowed to worship at the same church that the King of England belonged to. The same applied to most government jobs. So that’s why we included the religious clause, and further confirmed that in the Treaty of Tripoli. Again, check that Google thing you guys are always bitching about.

We recognize that the Constitution is a pretty vaguely worded document, but we thought we made it pretty clear on the whole religious front. It’s why we made it the first amendment to the Constitution, for Christ’s sake. You can belong to a religion that believes all negative emotions are caused by the spirits of dead aliens and still get elected to Congress. One guy actually did. So if someone wants to take the oath of office on the religious text of their choice (which, reminder, isn’t a constitutional requirement), let them.

Also, think about what the United States was when it was founded versus what it is now. We were an agrarian society that lacked indoor plumbing. The population was about 1 percent the size of what it was now, and we had only thirteen states.

Beyond that, what you seem to fail to realize is that when we were doing our thing, we were pretty much making it up as we went along. We were trying to build something resembling a representative democracy in the aftermath of a war that, quite frankly, even we were surprised we won. Additionally, we weren’t the first country to try this. Iceland has had a representative government since the tenth century or so.

Yes, we were inspired by documents like the Magna Carta. But when we were drafting the Constitution, we weren’t asking, “Is this what Stephen Langton would have done?” or “What would King John think?” with every sentence of the draft. It’s one thing to be inspired by us, but we didn’t anticipate for you to try and emulate everything we did.

We were Enlightenment thinkers; we believed that society and government should evolve over time. It’s why we let you guys amend the Constitution. Hell, we did it ten times right after the first draft. Also, this was our second stab at a governing document. The Articles of Confederation were a total clusterfuck.

In light of current events, it’s also worth noting that we were men of science. At least, whatever the commonly accepted science of the time was. We died of diseases most of you have probably never heard of before. However, with the prevailing vaccine question, we can’t stress enough that Washington required his troops to be inoculated for smallpox.

Remember smallpox? No, you don’t. Most of you never had it and never will, because there was a vaccine for it, and it worked so well that it pretty much eradicated it from the face of the Earth. And you joke about the ways people die in that Oregon Trail game, but that’s pretty much how most people kicked the bucket at the time.

Yes, we believed in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the first word there is “life.” So if the current government (which, by the way, we’d have never allowed women or Black people to participate in) is mandating vaccines, it’s to protect life.

At the end of the day, just bear in mind we’re long gone. Yeah, we founded the nation and all, but we figured you all would just use what we did as a framework, not as some bullshit excuse to whine about any minor inconvenience. Please, just let us rest in peace.