There's the problem exactly. You've got rights with that constitution thingee and all, but the system's now set up so that (even successfully) exercising those rights will cost you everything you have (and increasingly everything you're ever going to have).
The system has always been set up this way. There is a reason that the Founders were wealthy merchants, lawyers, and plantation owners, rather than workaday stiffs dependent on a paycheck.
The founders knew they were such and actually had a go at giving the workaday stiff a fighting chance. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it worked out as well as they'd hoped.
Yeah, many people forget that the US was at the time a very divided place* and what resulted in the Constitution was a compromise that no one really liked (in that no one got everything they wanted), but everyone agreed upon. The founders in the North, such as John Adams[1], were against slavery, while ones in the South were either indifferent/paradoxical or outright advocated for it. The fact it took hundreds of thousands of lives to unite us around 70 years later is a consequence of one of those great divisors. Even as progressive as the United States was at the time (compared to the rest of the European World), comparing our own ideas of freedom and equality to those of the late 18th century in a young nation with many people more concerned with living than education is kind of a fallacy.
I think most of the founders thought the issue of slavery would die out on its own in the next couple generations, but unfortunately, the cotton gin came along 30 or so years later and made it profitable once again. I do wonder if it had been known that such an invention would come about a short time later if that would have changed the way the constitution was written.
*Many were also flat out against a constitution because they felt it gave the federal government too much power.
