Why The Constitution: It’s the OS for the US? Why not a different book? There are lots of books on the Constitution. What makes this one special?
There’s no denying that there are lots of books but there aren’t many that don’t put you to sleep, and most are far longer. It’s also different because my agenda is to help you form your own views, not to push mine. (In fact, it is my hope that you can’t even be certain what my opinions are.)
The Constitution: It’s the OS for the US also explains things in a way that leaves you with images to help you remember how parts of the government interact. Did your high school civics book do that? Mine didn’t either.
A computer Operating System (OS) such as Windows tells a computer how to work, and it can’t work without one. Our Constitution does the same thing for our government. The book explains how different branches of our government are like virus protection, a firewall, PowerPoint, a massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft), and more.
A big component of the book is question sets. (They are in this blog, too.) The question sets encourage readers to think about the issues and form their own opinions. The paragraph below is an example of one question set from the book.
Many people want to expand government programs and departments. Others want to make them smaller. Who is right? Think of each department as a computer program. Why have a computer if you aren’t running any programs? Will it even work without any programs? But what happens when you run too many? It is the same with the government. We need one, and we need it to do certain things, but what do you think happens when we ask it to do too many? What happens to your computer?
