Once upon a time there was a boy who wanted an airplane more than anything else in the whole world.  He dreamed about the airplane constantly and spent hours imagining the fun he would have with it.

He badgered his parents constantly to get him this toy.  The father worried his son wouldn’t be able to take care of the airplane properly and his mother thought it would be too much responsibility.  But eventually, the father did the necessary work so that his boy could get his airplane.

The airplane was a beauty.  It was so highly polished; it appeared to have its paint stretched tight.  It maneuvered with grace and responded to the controls in a snap.  The engine purred as it soared through the sky.

Naturally, the toy was the envy of the neighborhood.  Every day the boy would fly his plane, his friends would gather around.  They would ask for a turn but the boy said, “My father got it for me.  It’s mine.  But you can watch if you want.”  

Some of the children criticized the way the boy flew the airplane.  They asked if he had read the instruction book.  “Reading is for sissies,” the boy replied.  “I prefer to listen to my gut and fly the plane the way I think it should go.”  And so he did.

Years went by and the toy airplane began to show some wear.  The boy had not looked at the directions which had called for regular maintenance and so he had not done any.  Some of his friends warned him he should tend to his airplane but he said, “That’s boring.  I want to fly the airplane, not take care of it.  Besides, if you want to watch me fly my airplane, you have to do what I want.”

So the neighborhood children watched the boy fly his airplane.  The paint on the airplane started to chip, the flaps didn’t perform as quickly as they had and the wings began to work their way loose.  One of the boy’s friends said, “I know how to fix the airplane and I can do it real fast.  It won’t take more than a few minutes of flying time” so the boy let him fix his airplane.

He wrapped the airplane in duct tape to “make it stronger” and he glued other parts into place so “they won’t fall off.”  The airplane flew even worse after the improvements.

The children became bored watching an airplane that didn’t fly well and they stopped watching.  The boy, anxious to get his adoring audience back as soon as possible, yelled at them, “Hey, watch this!  I can make it do loop-de-loops!”

Had the boy read the manual, he would have known the airplane was not designed to ever do loop-de-loops even when it was in perfect condition.  The airplane crashed and broke into several pieces.

“I was tired of playing with it anyway,” said the boy.  “What a piece of junk.”

A new boy had moved into the neighborhood and he loved airplanes more than anyone else did.  He asked if he could have the wreckage because he wanted to try to fix it.  It made him happy to see airplanes fly the way they were supposed to.  The boy said, “Fine.  I’m done with it.  That pile of rubble will never get off the ground again.”

The new boy gathered up the tattered remains of the airplane and started to make repairs.  He had studied the instruction book and when he wasn’t sure how to do something, he would go back and read it again.  He knew the manual had the answers to how to make the airplane fly again.

The neighborhood children grew impatient with the new boy.  “Just fly it the way it is,” they demanded.  “We don’t want to wait any longer.”

The new boy said, “It can’t fly the way it is now.  I have to fix it first.”

He gently oiled the gears and recharged the battery.  He unrolled the duct tape off of the wings and painted the airplane until it glowed.  He cleaned up the windows and repaired the rudder so the airplane would fly true.  The new boy had to work very hard to restore the airplane because no one had been taking care of it for a very long time.  The other children taunted him that he was “doing it wrong” and “taking FORever!”  “Just fly it!”

The new boy didn’t listen to their jeers because he had read the directions and knew the airplane would never fly right unless all of the repairs were made.

Finally, after many difficult and trying hours, after learning from his mistakes and trying again and again, the new boy finished the job. 

It was a bright and sunny day when he took the restored airplane out for its test flight.  He started up the engine and it sputtered a bit.  The children laughed and said, “See?  We told you were doing it wrong.” 

The new boy checked the manual and made a few adjustments.  He tried again and this time, the engine purred, the flaps snapped to and sunlight bounced off the wings as it soared into the clear blue sky.  He let the other children take turns and the neighborhood rang with the sounds of laughter and delight. 

The original owner of the airplane walked over to the new boy and asked, “How did you do it, Barack?”  The new boy replied, “A lot of trial and error, an awful lot of work and reading and rereading the directions.”  He handed the original owner his tattered copy of the instructions, stained with oil and sticking together in a few places with old paint, its pages curling up at the corners and for the first time, George started to read:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…”