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     Be sure to include that imaginary letter by Alvin Toffler to the founding parents. It's some really good stuff.

     "To the Founding Parents:

     You are the revolutionists dead. You are the men and women, the farmers, merchants, artisans, lawyers, printers, pampleteers, shopkeepers, and soldiers who together created a new nation on the distant shores of America. You include the fifty-five who came together in 1787 to hammer out, during a broiling summer in Philadelphia, the astonishing document called the Constitution of the United States. You are inventors of the future that became my present.
     That piece of paper, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791, is clearly one of the stunning achievements of human history. I, like so many others, am continually forced to ask myself how you managed - how you were able, in the midst of bitter social and economic turmoil, under the most immediate pressures - to muster so much awareness of the emerging future. Listening to the distant sounds of tomorroy, you sensed that a civilization was dying and a new one was being born.
     I conclude you were driven to it - were compelled, carried along by the tidal force of events, fearing the collapse of an ineffectual government paralyzed by innapropriate principles and obsolete structures.
     Seldom has so majestic a piece of work been done by men of such sharply divergent temperaments - brilliant, antagonistic, and egotistic men - men passionately committed to diverse regional and economic interests, yet so upset and outraged by the terrible "inefficiencies" of an existing government as to draw together and propose a radically new one based on startling principles.
     Even now these principles move me, as they have moved countless millions around the planet. I confess it difficult for me to read certain passages of Jefferson or Paine, for example, without being brought to the edge of tears by their beauty and meaning.
     I want to thank you, the revolutionary dead, for having made possible for me a half-century of life as an American citizen under a government of laws, not men, and particularly for that precious Bill of Rights, which had made it possible for me to think, to express unpopular views, however foolish or mistaken at times - indeed, to write what follows without fear of suppresion.
     For what I now must write can all too easily be misunderstood by my contemporaries. Some will no doubt regard it as seditious. Yet it is a painful truth I believe you would have quickly grasped. For the system of government you fashioned, including the very principles on which you based it, is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppresive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented - a democracy for the twenty-first century.
     You know, better than we today, that no goverment, no political system, no constitution, no charter or state is permanent, nor can the decisions of the past bind the future forever. Nor can a government designed for one civilization cope adequately with the next.
     You would have understood, therefore, why even the Constitution of the United States needs to be reconsidered, and altered - not to cut the federal budget or to embody this or that narrow principle, but to expand its Bill of Rights, taking account of threats to freedom unimagined in the past, and to create a whole new structure of government capable of making intelligent, democratic decisions necessary for our survival in a new world.
     I come with no easy blueprint for tomorrow's constitution. I mistrust those who think they already have the answers when we are still trying to formulate the questions. But the time has come for us to imagine completely novel alternatives, to discuss, dissent, debate, and design, from the ground up, the democratic architecture of tomorrow.
     Not in a spirit of anger or dogmatism, not in a sudden impulsive spasm, but through the widest consultation and peaceful public participation, we need to join together to reconstitute America.
     You would have understood this need. For it was one of your generation - Jefferson - who, in mature reflection, decalered: "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverance and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment...I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions...But I also know that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind...As new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.
     For this wisdom, above all, I thank Mr. Jefferson, who helped create the system that served us so well for so long, and that now must, in turn, die and be replaced.

     Alvin Toffler

    

Washington, Connecticut

     An imaginary letter...Surely in many nations there must be others who, given the opportunity, would express similar sentiments. For the obsolescence of many of today's governments is not some secret I alone have discovered. Nor is it a disease of America alone.
     The fact is that building a new civilization on the wreckage of the old involves the design of new, more appropriate political structures in many nations at once. This is a painful yet necessary project that is mind-staggering in scope and will no doubt take decades to complete.
     In all likelihood it will require a protracted battle to radically overhaul - or even scrap - the United States Congress, the Central Committees and Politburos of the Communist industrial states, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the French Chamber and Deputies, the Bundestag, the Diet, the giant ministries and entrenched civil services of many nations, the constitutions and court systems - in short, much of the unwieldy and increasingly unworkable apparatus of supposedly representative governments.
     Nor will this wave of political struggle stop at the national level. Over the months and decades ahead, the entire "global law machine" - from the United Nations at one end to the local city or town council at the other - will eventually face a mounting, ultimately irresistible, demand for restructuring.
     All these structures will have to be fundamentally altered, not because they are inherently evil, nor even because they are controlled by this or that class or group, but because they are increasingly unworkable - no longer fitted to the needs of a radically changing world.
     This task will involve multimillions of people. If this radical overhaul is rigidly resisted it may well trigger bloodshed. How peaceful the process turns out to be will depend on many factors, therefore - on how flexible or intransigent the existing elites prove to be, on whether the change is accelerated by economic collapse, on whether or not external threats and military interventions occur. Clearly the risks are great.
     Yet, the risks of not overhauling our political institutions are even greater, and the sooner we begin, the safer we all will be.
     To build workable governments anew - and to carry out what may well be the most important political task of our lifetimes - we will have to strip away the accumulated cliches of the Second Wave era. And we will have to rethink political life in terms of three key principles.
     Indeed, these may well turn out to be the root principles of the Third Wave governments of tomorrow.