What I’ve learned from my own life experiences, as well as from writing the book What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?, is that we need others to make our lives complete.

When we are born and go through the various developmental stages that life represents, we obviously need the help of others to complete those various benchmarks successfully. The catalyst for achieving the level of development required of a given stage of life would be the adults’ love that made themselves available in helping us master each of those stages successfully. This will then in turn provide us with the ego-strength to handle the next challenging task necessary to live happy and productive lives, free of psychological encumbrances and conflicts that prevent growth from occurring.

Even though we may think our need for others stop when we reach the age of 21 or even younger that is simply not true. We need others to enrich our lives from birth until death. That’s because we are social beings and it is the sharing of intimacies and our love for one another that raises our joy of life to a whole new level of our being.

Growing up, when we did things together as a family, which involved my two brothers, myself, along with my mother and father, I don’t recall there were many times where intellectual and other kinds of competitive strivings weren’t part of the family dynamics. Rarely was that not the case. As a result, there always seemed to be sibling rivalry, antagonism and a general feeling that for every contest, there was one winner and the rest of the participants felt like losers. The only time that was not so, where we enjoyed each other for who we were, rather than trying to out-best one another, was during Christmas and birthdays, for it was during those times when those moments were pretty free of rivalry, challenges and conflict.

When I wrote What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?, one of the things I was most impressed with our Founding Fathers was what they did when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Right. They all put aside their competitive natures, petty differences and selfish interests for something greater than themselves, which was to cooperate with one another to write those three marvelous documents, all of which have stood the test of time.

Some of the Founding Fathers, along with their fellow colonists, men and women alike, also showed their selfless manner in other ways as well – either by directly fighting in the Revolutionary War, or, in various ways, indirectly supporting General Washington’s Continental Army; at the same time they recognized they could die on the battlefield, or, if they lost the war, they all would have been hung. When the war began, they understood that there was a greater chance of losing the war than winning it. Nevertheless, they recognized it was important to set this fledging nation on a sound footing so that future generations could enjoy the bountiful benefits of freedom that they and their fellow country men and women were willing to fight to preserve, even if loss of life, or death, by hanging resulted.  Now that was a real expression of unconditional love that they felt toward their future generation.

So, what happened to this willingness to set aside one’s selfish interest for something greater than oneself, which was one of the major foundations that was used to write the Constitution and most certainly was tacitly understood as being part of General Washington’s Continental Militia attitude when the Revolutionary War was fought?

Since the advent of political parties, after President Washington left office, the willingness to cooperate with one another for the greater good has become less and less evident over the years. The cooperative spirit has declined, until now, here in the 21^st century it is at low ebb and could disappear if our politicians don’t learn how to compromise and make laws that benefit ALL the people, instead of the politicians, special interest groups, lobbyists and/or corporations. What caused this sudden lack of cooperation between and among the politicians? What happened was that as soon as political parties got established, each member of each party began to look at their adversary with a jaundiced eye. The parties began to invent reasons for disliking each other. They began to attribute pejorative qualities to the opposing party that turned out to be half-truths. As the years progressed, so did the differences.

It’s important to not confuse our democratic system as being an economic system. Our democracy is a social system. The reason that’s important to understand is because our Constitution was formed to serve the people, not the corporations and the moneyed interests, which appears to be the case when we speak of our political parties. We need to get our politicians to start thinking like our Founding Fathers did, where they all work together for the greater good and, in so doing, be willing to give up their selfish interests for the greater good, which in this case would be for the good of the country, so that we can once again say, “I’m proud to be an American.”