The Bill of Rights is working just fine for me, thanks. Implementation is imperfect, because the human beings who are tasked with implementing it are all imperfect, but I have lived elsewhere, and I can tell the different between having the Bill of Rights and lacking it. A culture of "rule by law rather than rule by men" is important to make laws meaningful, but where I live we largely have that culture. I speak and write freely, my personal possessions are safe from arbitrary seizure, and when I want a jury trial, I can get a jury trial. Many people around the world enjoy none of these freedoms.
> The Bill of Rights is working just fine for me, thanks.
First, saying "things are worse in [some] other places that do not have a Bill of Rights" does not negate OP's point that "Far as I can tell, the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about [in the US]".
> I speak and write freely, my personal possessions are safe from arbitrary seizure, and when I want a jury trial, I can get a jury trial. Many people around the world enjoy none of these freedoms.
You may enjoy those freedoms. But not all US citizens enjoy these freedoms.
On paper the Bill of Rights protects all US citizens, and all US citizens equally. In practice, that is very much not the case. As the saying goes, freedom of speech exists to protect those whose words critics want to silence, not those whose uncontroversial words have no critics. More broadly, the litmus test for the Bill of Rights is not whether your freedoms are being upheld, but whether all others' freedoms are being upheld.
It's not enough to simply say that "the implementation is imperfect" when the exact ways in which the implementation is failing are the exact ways in which it needs to succeed.
There is a difference between an unsatisfactory enforcement of the Constitution, and its outright failure. Saying that "the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about" sounds like the latter, but the reality is closer to the former.
Point of fact: the word "citizen" does not appear in any article of the Bill of Rights.
They are restrictions upon the US government. In practice, this usually protects US nationals to a greater extent than any other nationality, but in theory, it should protect everyone on the planet from just one (particularly powerful) government. People elsewhere have their own government nastiness to deal with; they don't need to worry about ours as well.
Our testers are always telling us that "it works on my machine" is not sufficient cause to close a bug as not reproducible.
So the Bill of Rights works for you. Good job! Your environment is configured correctly.
But it has to work for everybody. You really need to look in to what is happening to the people in your municipality, county, state, and country that have less money and political power than you have.
What I see is that poorer people are being imprisoned at an ever-increasing rate, and that richer people are getting away with murder, sometimes literally. What I am seeing is less "rule by law" than "rule by money". It isn't quite "rule by men", but it certainly isn't equal justice for all.
