• States Rights Attack!

    Am I the only one who hears folks yelling about the Constitution and State’s Rights in the same breath, and feels their irony senses start to tingle?

    Let me get the obvious out of the way:

    1. I’m not a Constitutional Scholar
    2. I didn’t play one on TV

    While I’m at it, let me get the less obvious out of the way too:

    1. I’m not a historian
    2. I don’t think I’m smarter than the average bear
    3. I didn’t stay in a Holiday Inn last night

    I’m not even a history buff, though you might say I’m an intermittent, amateur historian. As such, I’ve been slogging through The Federalist Papers over the last year or so. I open up the copy on my Kindle when I’m having trouble sleeping.

    Anyhoo, back to irony.

    As I understand it, the US Constitution arose from the anarchy and ashes of the Articles of Confederation – a government (if you could really call it one) where the original states had ALL of the rights… and all of the power. My recollection from high school history was that in it’s earliest days our government was a chaotic mess, and the Constitution’s chief aim was to reign in the chaos by shifting some power away from the states, to the central government.

    Alexander Hamilton in Federalist #1:

    “Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments….”

    Yep, I dove deep for that one, eh? All the way down to the first sentence of the third paragraph of the fist essay.

    We could argue all day and into the next millennium about how much power the Constitution shifts to the central government, but I don’t think anyone can argue it does. Well, you could… but you’d be wrong.

    So this is what’s going through my head when someone starts popping off about The Constitution! The Tenth Amendment! States Rights!

    I wonder if they’re familiar with the history of the document they invoke, sometimes with a bit of angry spittle.

  • Breakable

    I wasn’t aware of this until recently, but my children treat me like I’m old and frail – like my bones are made of glass and my internals pop like a soap bubble. I don’t remember doing this with my father, but then this may say more about me than my son. My dad always seemed fairly rugged. Mind you – and I think he’d admit this himself – he’s not what you’d call a physical specimen. Folks don’t walk down the street, look at my dad, and say: “that dude’s more likely to break me than get broken.” But if we were out playing catch and he fell, I wouldn’t rush to his side asking (worriedly), “are you ok?”

    Two weeks ago I got out my old Aerobie. I dove for an errant throw, rolled through a fall, and slowly got up. Adam did the worried-rush over I described above. Incensed, I turned to him and said, “Adam, I’m not that fragile.”

    Of course, much of this week my back and neck have been killing me, but surely that’s just coincidence.

  • Sitting in the dark

    Empty LakeA month or so ago, I posted a picture to Facebook with the caption: “in over my head.” I think it sounded like I was lost, or any number of things other than what I intended, without the context of the pictures I posted before (which I suspect slipped past many folks). We were on a camping trip, visiting a place that goes much of the way back to me and Cheryl’s childhood. The first time we visited this large state park, out in the middle of North Florida Nowhere, we were students at UF. It was one of the few places I could go with Cheryl and just sit, relaxing.

    She’s not one for sitting around, that one.

    This recent trip was nostalgic – and incredibly sad. What made the park a wonder was the interaction between the land and water, the contradictions that make Florida ecology a delicious, but acquired taste.

    In spots, relatively high land can look dry and tortured – both by the semi-arid conditions and the periodic fires which sweep through. But hike a quarter mile down and you might find yourself stepping carefully down into a ravine, the temperature just slightly cooler… the air just slightly more humid… and the land MUCH more green and lush. Coming to an abrupt end, clear water trickles from spots in a steep, shaded hillside, which has eroded backwards over the years, and accumulates into a clear stream at the bottom. As simple and unassuming a place it is, few places on Earth look (or make me feel) more alive. Follow this stream a couple miles into the park and you find the lake in the picture below.

    Well, there was a time you could.

    So here’s what I was trying to say with this picture: I was standing in what was once a lake bed, and (almost) twenty years ago I would have been in water over my head.

    Pretty deep, I know.

    Sorry.

    As is my way, there were a bunch of things I was saying silently to myself. No amount of context would have dipped you into that stream of consciousness. I’ll get to my inner dialog in a second, but if you would first indulge a little cathartic swearing… fuck me. Take a look at this picture, taken in roughly the same direction, from what was then (in 1998) the lake shore:

    Full Lake

    Yep, there’s a lot less water flowing over the surface of northern Florida. The morning was filled with scenes like this (the first picture, not the one with all of the water), and I was in mourning. As the sun rose over a much drier Florida than I remembered, my mood felt darker – though not just because of that morning. I think it’s something that’s grown steadily worse for about the last seven years – though it got MUCH worse this last year… and Jesu Fucking Cristo, God help me worse in the last couple of months.

    Go back and ask the November 2008 Edition of Me about the state of things, and I would have been really worried about the economic rubble strewn around me, but I couldn’t have been much more optimistic about the state of society as a whole. Heck, I was thinking about going back to church – and did, for a little while. A black man had been elected President and I thought human kindness had turned a corner.

    The November 2016 Edition of Me felt like human kindness had been tortured, humiliated, and tossed into a dumpster fire.

    I’d hoped to write more than this, but that’s about all I can take right now. I’m gonna go hide for the rest of the evening/night, and see how I feel tomorrow – JK