Originalist Sin

Let’s say you and I move in together. We’ve been living with our parents, but we’re sick of them telling us what to do. And what do they know anyway? It’s blissful at first, all that freedom, but after a while little things need to be settled, and a few big ones. We make some rules. We mostly follow them.

The years go by. Children come and go. Jobs and cities come and go. One day we look at one another and everything but our affection for each other is different than it was on that fateful day when we took the plunge together. You’ve developed a chronic limp. I’ve got a bad shoulder. You need help getting down the stairs. I need help getting down the dinner plates.

Through the years, though, we’ve stayed together. We’ve had a spat or two, some rocky times, but we’ve always worked it out. We’ve adapted. In fact, if I had to point to one thing besides our love for one another as the key to the durability of our union, I would say it is our ability to adapt.

We are no longer the young people we were, and I’m not talking about our bodies. We are the same in some ways, but we have gained wisdom and perspective. Our ideals have stayed with us, but they are tempered now by the lessons we have learned about what life really is, about what it means to live together, to stay together, to care for one another. Much as I loved him, I would not want the young man I was when we met to make decisions for us today.

Perhaps it is too sentimental a perspective, too personal, but I look upon our country the same way I do two committed people living together. We made our rules when we are young and, by and large, as the centuries have gone by we have adapted in ways small and large to accommodate our changing circumstances. We had that pretty serious disagreement we called the Civil War, but we worked through that, if you can call killing so many of us working through it. I’d have to say that the country we took forward after 1865 has not, still, fully gotten over the pain and disillusionment of that bitter fight. But we have stayed together.

Big issues divide us still. Should government interfere in our businesses? Should it dictate our morals? Should it tax us to spend for programs that we don’t support or that offend our religious views? These are the national equivalent of who does the chores, who manages the money, who stays home from work when a child is sick. Anyone who has been involved in a domestic tiff at two in the morning knows how tough these issues can be, how emotional.

What domestic partners also know is that arrangements made when there were no children, before one partner got an amazing job offer in another city, before one got cancer, aren’t always well suited to those new circumstances. Before you have children, no one has to stay home with them. After you do, you have to make new rules.

Our system of laws works like that. Legislatures make new laws to deal with new circumstances. They repeal laws that turned out to be a mistake. But there is one set of rules that is not so easily changed: the Constitution. Generally, that’s a good thing. It has stood us well. It has held us together. But it does present this challenge for our courts: it must govern us as we are today, not as we were in 1787.

It must do that, unless, as a judge, you decide it’s just too hard to adapt our founding document to modern times. You can lighten your judicial burden considerably by deciding that the Constitution means what the Founding Fathers intended it to mean and that’s that. This is an intellectually and morally lazy approach masquerading as judicial modesty. It is called “originalism,” and it is the governing credo of at least two of our current Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Working with that cramped view requires stubborn determination. There were no assault weapons in 1787. There was no electronic surveillance; not even any electricity. No woman was saying it ought to be her legal right to get an abortion, although many died trying; and it wouldn’t have mattered if they had been saying that, they couldn’t have made it happen because they didn’t have the right to vote. There must have been gay men and women, but they weren’t clamoring for the right to get married. They weren’t clamoring for anything; they were slipping around in the shadows. Interstate commerce was conducted from a horse drawn wagon.

The changes the country has gone through are similar to those families go through. And let me just say: I would not like to be married to an originalist.

Who cares what Madison thought? Or Jefferson (the slave owner who made a mistress of one of his slaves). Sure, they were smart guys, but they are long dead, as are their times. The Constitution works today by common consent. Not because the landed aristocracy of the eighteenth century gave us a bible. Our form of government is a political compact, not a religion. And as a compact, the parties who are governed by it must want to be, or it will fall apart.

As a nation, we have grown and changed. If the rules that ease our coexistence are to be effective, and therefore to last, they must address our present circumstances. We have children in the house. Someone has to stay home with them. Sacrifices of individual liberty must be made (the right to bear arms), accommodations of changing norms (gay marriage). Are those sacrifices worth it? The answer to that can be found in any home? Are you a better person for the sacrifices and accommodations you have made for your partner and your children? Or would you be happier if you could do whatever you damn-well pleased?

Social Insecurity

When my children were growing up, I hoped they wouldn’t be gay. I grew up in the South. I was one of the privileged ones, a WASP from a well-to-do family, but I didn’t feel like that. I felt like I didn’t fit in. Not at the country club where I played golf, not at the roadhouses I hung around in with my high-school friends. In both cases, the reason was rednecks.

The rednecks in the roadhouses were terrifying. They made me feel they would just as soon kill me as look at me. The good old boys at the country club weren’t as threatening to me personally, but they made me nervous too. In that society, at the very top of it, they had a combination of power and disdain for others that, even to a boy, seemed wrong. With power should come guardianship, not cruelty.

I think it would surprise you, even shock you, to hear the way men who were the pillars of local business and society talked about people they considered inferior. Blacks of course. So imbedded in the culture was the color caste system that jokes at the expense of blacks were not even whispered. You could hear the punch lines ringing out in the men’s grill. Jews, too: “Jew” was a verb. And homosexuals: light in their loafers; don’t drop your soap in the shower.

I see now that their behavior was a kind of cultural circling of the wagons against attacks of otherness on their way of life. At the time, they just seemed like bullies. Like the KKK. Like those men who tied Mathew Shepard, a gay teenager, to a fence in Wyoming and beat him to death. Those roadhouse and country club rednecks of my youth were my introduction to social bullies.

Like all parents, I wanted my children to have friends. I wanted them to fit in and be accepted. I didn’t want them to be the butt of jokes. I didn’t want them to be bullied. Not for their sexual orientation, not for anything. I wanted them not to be gay for the same reason I wanted them not to have some other target on their backs that said “Mock me, ostracize me.”

As a society, our attitude toward gays is changing. A majority of Americans now support gay marriage. But there is entrenched opposition in parts of the culture. I don’t know how high the correlation is between opposition to gay marriage and opposition to abortion, but I suspect it is high. Perhaps religion unites them, but that would be painting with broad brush: there are fundamentalist religions of all stripes that are intolerant; there are tolerant people in all religions. In any event, religion does not belong in politics. This country was founded by pilgrims trying to avoid religious persecution.

Lately, however, there is a kind of banding together under one roof of those who disapprove of what I would call social progressivism, of those who believe that homosexuality is an abomination and abortion is murder. That roof does not have a cross on it. Instead, over the doorway is the banner of the Republican Party.

My father was a Republican. He was a doctor. He hated the idea of socialized medicine, even though he delivered many babies for apple pies and country hams. He hated paying taxes, even though he overpaid people he hired to help him with remodeling projects. But one thing he didn’t hate was people. Black, white, gay, straight, he took them all as they were. He might not like you, but it had nothing to do with the color of your skin or your sexual preferences. I don’t think he would recognize today’s Republican Party. I think he would wonder, as do I, how what we call social issues became their rallying cry.

If you think, as I do, that a lot of the objection to gay rights and reproductive rights stems from traditional ways of looking at our relationships with one another, and from feeling threatened when those traditions are challenged, then you might well ask yourself, as I think my father would ask today if he were alive, what are those issues doing in politics? Dad was a smart guy, and a bit of a con man himself. I don’t think it would take him long to come up with the answer: Callous manipulation.

The Republican Party does not, as a governing manifesto, care about social issues. What it cares about is preserving an economic status quo that has permitted men of business to shape the rules to benefit themselves; and which, incidentally, has kept gays, women and the poor in their place.

Many of the people who identify as Republicans because of perceived affinity on social issues could use the economic help their party doesn’t want the government to give them. They need social security and Medicare. They sometimes need unemployment benefits. They need job training. Their children need early childhood education and decent day care. Their party has sold them snake oil. It’s promises deal with things that don’t really impact their daily lives while it’s actions ignore their needs, or worse, make their problems worse by widening income inequality and reducing government spending on the social safety net.

That should be enough to cause anyone who is not rich to think twice about wanting to be a Republican. But if you’re not convinced, if the threat to your own economic self-interest is not sufficient to move you, think of your children. Ask yourself this question: What if my son or daughter turns out to be different from others? Maybe he’s gay. Maybe she’s fat or skinny, pale or dark, or just nerdy? Do I want her to be scorned and bullied? Do I want him to feel ashamed of who he is?

The M Among Us

I watched the movie “Skyfall” a few days ago and realized that one of my good friends is a dead-ringer, in character, for M. Here’s the plot of the real-life terrorist attack my friend thwarted:

Suzie Stewart, in front (as always)

Setting: late afternoon in Palo Alto, California, outside a children’s theatre that has been a community treasure since 1932. Children who have come for rehearsal watch with shock and confusion as police escort the director, assistant director and two other staff members out of the building. Travelers’ checks are missing. Or maybe found. No one is quite certain. The staff members are suspended by the city. No formal charges are brought, but the police chief gives interviews in which she says they have proof of "serious financial misconduct and other possible criminal activity."

It’s not just the kids who are shocked. The four staff members have been at the theatre for most of their lives. They put on plays with homemade costumes. The kids are the stars. No adults permitted onstage. No one knows just what is going on. The police are secretive, using innuendo rather than particulars. The city manager says that his hands are tied, that he can’t interfere with a police investigation. Ditto the city council. It listens mutely as community members fill the council chamber to beg for fair treatment for the theatre staff. The mayor (whose grandson is a child actor at the theatre) says privately that if he tries to interfere he could lose his council seat.

Two weeks after being shut out of his theatre, the assistant director dies. At his funeral, a state senator, who has said many times that the theatre saved his life when he was a lost teen, gives a eulogy in which he says sometimes good people make mistakes. The feeling the experience gave me at the time was that the Gestapo had come to town and rounded up a few citizens to make examples of them while the local officials looked the other way.

But my friend, the one like Judi Dench’s M, didn’t look the other way. She had spearheaded a major addition to the theater a decade before. Her daughter had been an actor in the theatre. She knew the theatre staff. She knew their foibles, their eccentricities, but she also knew they were not capable of stealing from the institution to which they had given their lives. While the city government played Pilate, she waded into the fight.

She spoke at city council meetings. She visited council members privately. She led marches. She raised money for a legal defense fund for the suspended staff. She rallied crowds at fundraisers and protests. She wrote op-ed pieces for the local newspaper. She pushed the city to appoint a police auditor to look into the investigation. Miraculously, it did.

And when the city council got the police auditor's report, they wrote a letter of apology for “the errors and injustices committed during the Palo Alto Police Department's investigation.” “The Auditor concluded that the investigation seriously violated proper police protocols and ignored extensive exonerating evidence,” they said. They repudiated the police report and ordered that the public record be set straight.

Lives had been ruined by then. The director, who had been in that post for fifty years, did not return. The assistant director, who wrote or co-wrote twenty five plays and musicals during his thirty years at the theatre, died under suspicion of being a crook.

My friend who stood up to what can be not unfairly called a terrorist attack is Suzie Stewart. Like M, she fights for what she knows is right even when others doubt, even when others shirk. And in the end she gets it right.

Suzie is dying now. She is gravely ill. She will not recover. But her face and life shine before all who know her even as her body weakens. I’ve never known anyone who better embodies the lines from Tennyson that M quoted in “Skyfall.”

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Laundry Court

Let’s say you want your domestic partner to do the laundry and she won’t. Or, more credibly, he won’t. You cajole. You hide socks and favorite t-shirts. There was that unfortunate bleach spill. And the time no laundry got done (except yours, on the sly) for weeks. Nothing worked. Now what? Give up and go back to doing it yourself?

I hate to say this, but I was a chauvinist pig. I may still be--what man can ever be trusted to evaluate his own porkiness?--but I can say for sure that I am not as bad as I used to be. I do the laundry. I do the floors. I suffer. I don’t do the taxes, though. Meg does those. I don’t suffer that much.

I have numerous excuses for my past misconduct, but in my heart I know it came down to what I could get away with. When I started domestic life the first time, I was still in college. If no one told me to clean my room, I didn’t. Never mind making dinner or washing dishes.

When Meg and I got married, we were both working all the time. We outsourced a lot of domesticity. But when, after our second child was born, Meg started writing novels, her schedule was more flexible than mine, so she did more (much more) at home than I did. Then I started writing too, and we were back to even in terms of outside demands.

Ah, but old habits are hard to break. Especially when you don’t even particularly want to break them. On some level. every man knows he should do his fair share. But when it comes to domestic partnership, most men are teenagers at heart. We don’t like to clean. Many of us don’t cook that well. Drive the kids to school? The hugs are nice, but it’s not long before you don’t even get those, just a blur of disappearing backpack. I suppose domestic chores are satisfying in some Puritanical way, but I’m so not a Puritan.

So I had to be coaxed. At one point we made lists of things that had to get done and divided them between us. I was clever. I love Meg insanely, but I did my best, while trying to seem sympathetic and supportive, to fill my list with easy chores. It was kind of like negotiating for kisses in the drive-in-movie. Of course I love you. Of course I respect you. You can trust me.

I won’t say I’m totally facon, but, as I said, I’m better. Of course, Meg and I have been married twenty-five years, and it was only two weeks ago that I conceded to make dinner every other night (which, but my definition, includes ordering pizza). She’s too gracious to say so, but it must have been a pain for her to bring me along. Kind of like living with a toddler for a really long time.

We watched the PBS special on the women’s liberation movement, and it got me wondering about why women don’t have any help in getting their husbands and boyfriends to be full partners at home. In the workplace, the unequal workload that falls on women at home would be grounds for a sex-discrimination suit. We no longer expect women to deal with workplace gender inequality by themselves. We give them help with laws that require (mostly) that they be treated equally. No such laws exist for work at home.

Business and domestic relationships are completely different, you say. A boss just wants your contribution to the business. A domestic partner adores you and would do anything for you. That’s the theory. You be the judge if it is the practice.

Half of all marriages end in divorce. Of the remaining half, let’s be generous and say half of those are marriages of equals; in the other half, women do more than men. (I am omitting what I consider to be the statistically insignificant number of relationships in which men do more than women). That means that three quarters of marriages aren’t working so well. Maybe the half that end in divorce had some marriages of equals, but that doesn’t seem too likely. A woman can overlook a lot of faults in a man who can wash, dry and fold; I’m living proof.

My facts are purely guesses, of course, but I’ll bet they aren’t far off. It is indisputable, I think, that women still do more, likely much more, of the work in the home than do men. For those who want careers outside the home, it holds them back. They may do the extra work, but few think it’s fun or fair.

Which brings me to this question: Why should women have to bear all the burden of changing their men? When it comes down to it, the tools they have aren’t all that great. An appeal to fairness can feel like pleading, which is not good for self-esteem. And you can’t roll out a big gun like “You don’t love me” too often or it becomes true.

Why not give women another tool? One that is more emotionally neutral. One that doesn’t depend on willpower or wile. A tool like they have in the workplace. Why not give them a legal right to have their husbands do half the housework? I’m not sure how such a right would be enforced. Lawsuits seem unlikely. Divorce would almost certainly come before court. But how about some kind of mediation? Like the arbitrations used so often in business.

Make a list of chores. If the couple can’t agree, the mediator decides who has to do what. Just having that kind of independent determination would cause a lot of men to do better. And wives and girlfriends wouldn’t have to beg or use the heavy artillery of love, sex and guilt to get the dishes washed.

Vocational Training

When was the last time you read Homer in the original Greek? How about Latin? Can you speak Latin? Read it? Me neither.

But it hasn’t been that long since, if you were highborn, tutors taught you those ancient languages as an essential part of your education as a Renaissance Man (not so much emphasis on Renaissance Women in those days). Men like Thomas Jefferson were raised this way. As a matter of birth and privilege, they took their places as our thinkers and policy makers, the heirs to Aristotle and Plato.

Not many pursuing a classical liberal education today have a place waiting for them at the table of power. They are educated to be founding fathers, but they end up waiting tables or signing on as management trainees in businesses they know nothing about except that they offer health-care coverage.

I saw a program on public television recently about “immersive learning.” Kids in middle school were building robots to compete with each other. Students in high-school statistics classes were designing and conducting election exit polls and analyzing the responses. No one was drifting off to sleep at her desk.

The program made me think of my son Nicholas’s experience with robotics and musical theatre, both starting in middle school. Each was deep immersion. Each inspired enduring passion. Today, a junior in college, Nick is studying computer science and singing in the men’s glee club. On the side (I hope), he’s programming for a Silicon Valley start-up.

In college, I thought I wanted a broad liberal arts education, although I had no idea what that meant, not really. That was what I had been taught would make me a Renaissance Man, which sounded like a cool thing to be (and probably was, during the Renaissance). My course of study as an English major improved my understanding of how people behave in novels and plays but did nothing for my ability to affect any living person’s behavior. It was enervatingly passive. I had no idea what my place in the world might be. I could not see myself making a difference to anyone about anything.

In law school, I acquired a trade. I didn’t cure cancer, but it was a heck of a lot more satisfying than sitting around philosophizing impotently. High school and college were long paths to the law, longer than they needed to be. Law (like medicine and engineering, for instance), is its own little universe of rules and logic. Maybe if I'd gotten turned onto law in middle school or high school, I could have avoided all that listless wandering about in college, wondering what it was all about.

Here’s what I tell my children (as I remember it; they may say something different): Find something you love and do it. Actively look for it. Don’t wait for it to fall into your lap while you check off curriculum requirements. The flush of academic achievement is like sex: it’s a lot of fun, but it will not to sustain you if you don’t really care about what (or whom) you’re studying. Bend your education to your passion, not the other way around. Work hard at what you love. Get good at it. Do something no one else can do.

Old Woman Sweeping

I saw an old woman sweeping today. She was sweeping the gutter in front of the apartment building where she lives. Not the sidewalk, the gutter. She was stooped over a broom of yellow straw, one like you might find in any kitchen pantry, sweeping carefully, methodically, moving forward slowly, as if to make sure nothing in her small pile of debris got away. I was on my bike, so the moment, the visual image, passed quickly.

But not the question: why was she sweeping the gutter? It wasn’t particularly littered. No scraps of paper or soda cans. Just a few leaves and twigs, and not many of those, as street-sweeping trucks with whirling brushes scrub our gutters weekly. What brought her out on a fine sunny morning to perform her solitary chore?

There is another woman in my neighborhood, nearer my house, on a route I take to walk my dog, who is often out sweeping her sidewalk when we come by. She lives in a nice house. Thanks to her continuing diligence, her sidewalk is pristine. It is usually the brown leaves and red berry pods of her magnolia tree that I see her nursing along with her broom. I smile and say hello, sometimes making a gentle joke about how hard it is to stay ahead of nature’s messiness. She has a warm, open face and an easy manner and always responds brightly as she continues sweeping.

On that same walk there is an older man who sweeps the pavers in front of his garage. There are liquid amber trees all up and down the street. They drop brown spikey seed pods that look like big round cockleburs. They are everywhere, except in the sweeping man’s yard. He gets them all.

My grandfather cut his own grass with an ancient gas lawnmower until he was ninety four. I thought he should hire someone, but he said he liked the exercise. In Tennessee, where he lived, grass has to be cut or it grows waist high. But sweeping your already-pretty-clean-and-soon-to-be-swept-by-the-street-sweeper gutter? Why do that? Other than a paid gardener or an impressed teenager, I’ve never seen a young person doing such a thing.

As we grow older, perhaps we become more more compulsive. I don’t know if that’s scientifically verified, though. More anxious, perhaps, but that’s not the same thing. I don’t think it’s a compulsion for a tidy yard that causes my neighbors to reach for their brooms--or, now that I think of it, my grandfather, the ex-university president, to have fired up his lawnmower.

The one woman I chat with on my walk is a widow, but you don’t have to be alone to feel useless. Indeed, having someone else in the house might intensify the feeling. You know your worthlessness is being observed. You can’t kid yourself.

It’s not just Princeton from Avenue Q who is searching for his purpose. We all are. Constantly. Continuously. Even when we find it, it rarely lasts. A child grows up. A job ends. And there you are, back on Avenue Q, starting all over again. Looking inside yourself for the answer, over and over again, can be tough. Sometimes it’s easier to look for something to sweep out of the gutter.

Laying Down Arms

First I had a BB gun. A Red Ryder lever action with a leather thong hanging from a gold ring. Then a Crosman CO2 pellet gun. To a twelve-year-old boy of my time, a pellet gun was a bazooka. I could knock a quarter off a log from twenty yards.

When I was sixteen, my father gave me a shotgun. A single-shot, bolt-action, sixteen-gauge J.C. Higgins from Sears. It was exciting but also a bit of an embarrassment. Two of my best friends had fancy pump-action Remingtons. They were a little reckless. One was shooting birds in his suburban front yard and shot out his neighbor’s glass storm door. They used to take me to a field with an old barn where we waged campaigns against tin cans, pigeons and the long grass that quivered where rabbits had been a split-second before.

I didn't shoot again for twenty years, until my father-in-law, a hunter, gave my first two sons Browning Sweet Sixteens and took us all out on opening day of dove season. Doves hurtling in black silhouette across a bright September sky are like targets in a video game, at least until you pick up a wounded bird, soft and warm in your hand, to break its neck.

The boys and I hunted doves with their grandfather back in Tennessee for a few seasons, and pheasants once. In L.A. we used to go up into the foothills above our house and shoot clay pigeons. The boys were good shots, particularly my oldest. When a rattlesnake snuck up behind us while we rested in the shade, I shot and missed twice and he took the gun from me and saved us with the last shell.

Those boys grew up and went off to college and I put my Smith & Wesson twenty gauge up on the closet shelf, where it has been for so long I've forgotten the combination for the trigger lock. I remarried and had young boys again, but I did not teach them to shoot. I didn’t even like for them to have Nerf guns. I think I had become ashamed of how easily I had killed harmless creatures in my other life, before they were born. What did that say about me? Nothing I wanted to admit.

A few months ago, my oldest son, my defender-from-rattlesnakes, called to say he was taking his own son to a skeet range. He said my sweet little twenty-gauge would be perfect for that. I know he likes the gun, and I’ve always told him he could have it one day, but before I got around to shipping it, twenty schoolchildren were massacred in Newtown, Connecticut.

When I see a policeman in Starbucks with a gun strapped on his hip, I want to say: Get out of here with that god-awful thing. You’re making me nervous. Guns don’t belong in coffee shops. My sensitivity is like an allergy: I was exposed for a long time with no bad reaction, then one day I began breaking out in hives. Maybe it’s myself I fear, the me of my killing days, the me in others.

My shotgun is still in the closet. As much as I love my son, as much as I enjoyed our days in the field together, I can't bring myself to send it to him. There are too many guns, doing too much damage. I can't get rid of them all, but I can get rid of one.

The Right to Yield Your Ground

If I could abolish one word, it would be the noun “right.” As in Bill of Rights. Right to life. Right to privacy. Gun rights. Reproductive rights. Calling something a right is too absolute. A right is non-negotiable. We don’t like it when someone tries to take one away. It’s hard to even talk about it.

All rights share the road with other rights. We have the right to free speech, but not to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. I had a law professor who put it this way: there are no rights, only interests. When individual interests conflict with each other or with broader societal interests, someone has to weight each in the balance.

That job has largely fallen to the Supreme Court. On their scale, an individual “fundamental right” is outweighed only by a “compelling state interest.” Sometimes it seems that a faction on the Court has its thumb on one side or another of the scale, but overall I think the Justices do a better job than many of us at recognizing the legitimacy of competing interests.

Outside the courtroom, in social and political discourse, too often our arguments sound like this:

“I want an abortion.”  
“That’s murder.”
“You’re not the one who has to raise the unwanted child.”
“Murder is murder.”

Or this:

“I want to marry my same-sex partner.”
“That’s just wrong.”

I own a shotgun. I used to shoot skeet and the occasional dove. I’m giving the gun away. After Newtown, I just don’t want it around anymore. I was raised in the south on hamburger and bacon. I took that kind of food for granted. Now, though, when I think about how animals are raised to support those food choices--pigs and calves spending their entire lives in crates--my interest in eating ham and veal doesn’t seem so compelling.

My metamorphosis on these and other issues has been gradual and organic. No one has pushed me. But sometimes events bump up hard against us. When that happens before we’re ready, we’re likely to dig in. Fearing that if we don’t stand our ground we might lose a way of life we cherish, we stop making an effort to understand the other guy’s point of view.

I love religious freedom, not least because implied in that term is freedom from religion. I don’t have to abide by another’s beliefs. The Obamacare contraception controversy is a good example of “rights” being swung like cudgels. Some business owners say it offends their religious beliefs to provide health-care coverage for abortions. What if they were Christian Scientists who didn’t believe in medical care at all? Could they refuse all health coverage for their employees?

The things we call rights are like coats. They keep us warm. They protect us from all but the most extraordinary conditions. They are not swords. They are not meant to slay heathens. It has been a long time since infidels were burned at the stake, but in many debates over things like abortion and gay marriage we are no less intolerant. It seems to me we have more to fear from becoming the kind of people who turn away from empathy than we have to fear from two men who want to live peacefully together or a pregnant teen who isn’t ready to be a mother.

Goodbye To All That

What if you were afraid and angry all the time? You might have anxiety disorder. Or rage disorder. Or you might just be getting older.

Anxiety in young people tends to be transient. Nervousness about a test, a job interview, a date. There are clinical disorders that make even the young anxious all the time, but they are not the norm.

The same is true of anger. Young people get mad, but they don’t usually stay mad. They are wired to look forward. They are wired to be optimistic. Optimism and anger are not good roommates.

But when we get older, our future shrinks before our eyes. There are no longer endless possibilities. In fact, sometimes it can seem that there are no possibilities at all. Of course we get anxious as we watch our prospects dwindle. Of course we get angry.

The problem is, we also have a culture that reveres the wisdom of elders. Particularly elder men. Just look at the makeup of Congress. These are the old men with low testosterone blues. These are the men of diminished prospects. These are the men desperate to hang onto a world that is slipping away from them.

These are not the people who should be making our laws. We don’t need to ditch our seminal law, the Constitution, as a Georgetown law professor argued in an op-ed piece today, we need to ditch our lawmakers. We need to dump the grumpy old men in Congress who can’t seem to get anything done and replace them with young and hopeful men and women. The young are the ones who believe in the future. They are the ones who will live in it. They are the ones to whom we should entrust it.

Supreme Stupidity

In the summers of 2008 and 2010, our national bloodletting got endorsements from the Supreme Court. That’s when Justices Scalia and Alito and their conservative brethren struck down bans on handguns in D.C. and Chicago. The right to own a gun for self defense is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution, the Court said in Heller vs. D.C and McDonald vs. Chicago.

The rulings make serious gun control impossible. Justice Scalia did say recently that the right to “bear arms” means you have to be able to bear them, so laws limiting ownership of canons would be okay. He also said some future Court would have to decide about hand-held rocket launchers capable of bringing down passenger planes.

Today twenty Connecticut school children were shot with handguns in their classroom. I guess you don’t need a canon or a rocket-propelled grenade to do a lot of damage. See also, Aurora, Columbine, etc., etc.

Self-defense. That’s what we need them for. Let’s take a look at that. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center found that guns on the street and in the home are more likely to be used to intimidate innocents than for self-defense. Few criminals are actually shot by law-abiding citizens.

If you read the Heller and McDonald opinions, one of the things you’ll notice is how much time is spent on what people thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Did they like guns? Did they think it was important to own them? Well, sure. They had just used them to overthrow the English. And it was a wild country for a long time after that. With the nearest sheriff a day away, it made sense to be able to protect yourself.

In his reasoning in McDonald, Justice Alito makes a point of how much the American colonists admired the English laws that guaranteed the right to keep arms. Today, of course, England has the some of the toughest gun control laws (and lowest gun crime rates) in the world. I share the admiration of our forebears for the English approach. Too bad our laws didn’t adapt to changing times as intelligently as theirs did.

When I was a boy, people who didn’t like the views of liberal judges or ivory-tower academics called them “pointy-heads,” meaning they might have a high IQ but they were hopelessly out of touch with the real world. Well, the Alito gang at the Supreme Court certainly fits that bill. We’re no longer a nation of farmers. We’re not civilian revolutionaries. The nearest sheriff is just around the corner.

While our eighteenth-century rights, which we don’t even use much for their intended purpose, are being protected, who is looking out for the children who are being murdered? It’s as if the grizzled old sheriff in a Hollywood Western met the wild, gun-toting cowboys as they rode into town and said: Have a drink on me, boys. Plenty of ammunition behind the bar. Last one alive, turn out the lights.

The Girl in the Woods

The President and the Speaker have been locked in the windowless room for forty-eight hours. There are no beds, no chairs, only a small toilet in the corner. Neither man liked dropping his pants in front of the other. The room is close, and a little smelly. They take turns sitting against the wall and pacing. There’s not enough room for both to pace at once. They’ve been told they will be released only when they are honest with each other.

They began by restating their core governing principles. They thought that would be enough, but the door did not open. Within the last hour Speaker Boehner has hinted that he does not want to loose his leadership position. President Obama has conceded that he does not want to be remembered as the one who couldn't get anything done. They glance at the two-way mirror: We’ve admitted our fears, let us out of here. But the door does not open.

Another day and night pass. They have had no food or water. It is hot in the room, and both men have stripped off their shirts. John admits that he did not like the smell of old men and whiskey and urine when he unloaded kegs and swept out his father’s bar. He helped care for his ten younger siblings, but he would have liked not to have been responsible for anyone but himself. Barack says that all the time he was growing up he never felt he fit in. Not white, not black, part of each, not wholly either.

At dawn of the fourth day, the door opens. They put on their shirts and pull themselves together as best they can, expecting photographers. But when they step out of the room, they are not in Washington but in a forest. The forest floor is shadowed. A sun-dappled mist shrouds the high canopy. The birds are just waking.

They walk for a while, hoping to see houses or a road, but there is nothing. They stop and rest and walk again. They lick the moisture off leaves and eat grasses and wild berries. In late afternoon, with the forest already growing dim, they stop to make shelter. They break pine branches for a lean-to. Exhausted, they sleep through the night.

In the morning they find pine needles and twigs and flint and they strike a rock against the flint and make a fire. They take turns tending the fire so it does not go out. They find more berries to eat and John walks in widening circles until he finds water. They move their camp to the bank of the stream and drink the water. They catch crawfish under rocks in the stream and lay them on the coals of the fire and eat them. In a deep pool downstream, Barack scoops out a trout with his hands. They gut it and strip a sapling and skewer the fish and cook it over the fire.

They have stopped talking about themselves. They don’t speak much at all, in fact. There is no need to. Both know what must be done.

After days of following the stream, camping beside it, eating its fish and drinking its water, they come upon a cabin in a clearing. They feel they should be overjoyed to have found other human beings, but they are cautious as they approach. John knocks on the door while Barack hangs back. He says he doesn’t want to frighten whoever is inside.

A middle-aged woman with a blue head scarf answers the door. She beckons them inside and gives them hot soup while her children watch from near the fire, an older girl and two young boys. They study the strangers with a combination of curiosity and feral wariness.

The woman says she and the children have been alone for years. Her husband went into the forest one day and did not return. They have a garden behind the cabin and they fish in the stream. The children know how to forage for berries and mushrooms. She cannot leave them to look for a way out of the forest, and she is afraid to take them on a long journey that might kill them.

Her daughter is bright, the woman says. She could learn and do something better with her life if she could find the way out. She asks John and Barack to take the girl with them when they leave. The girl does not want to leave her family. Perhaps she is afraid. Perhaps she is just loyal. But her mother tells her she must go, not just for herself, but for her brothers too.

The woman wraps some berries and vegetables in a bandana and gives it to Barack and John and the girl. It is all she can spare, she says. She stands in the doorway of her cabin and watches her daughter walk off between these men who have come into her life so unexpectedly and to whom she has entrusted the most precious things her in life: her child and her hope for the future.

The Tea Party Within Me

When my mother was seventy-eight, she asked if she could give someone twenty-five-thousand dollars. She said this person really needed it and she wanted to help her. She asked me because I was handling her finances for her. She had enough to live on. If she didn’t get some dreadful disease, she would have enough to live out her life comfortably. But if the costs of her care went up in her later years, her financial security was not so certain. I told her she shouldn’t give away that much. She might need it herself.

Over the years she asked me again and again whether she could make that gift. I kept saying no. Sometimes our discussions got a little heated. She wanted to do what she wanted to do and resented being told she could not. I was just being responsible, I thought. I had actuarial tables and the escalating cost of nursing care to back me up. She had only her desire to be kind to someone in greater need than she.

I share this story not to expose my heartlessness--although I regret to this day not letting her make that gift, all the more so since she died with plenty of money in the bank--but to explore why I resisted her request and why, if she were still alive, I probably would still be resisting.

I have a feeling that many in the Tea Party are more like me than I like to think. Whether you are thinking about your aging parent or your country, planning not to run out of money is tricky. The Tea Party doesn’t want the government to spend more than it can afford for the same reason I didn’t want Mom to: they don’t want the burden of the loss to fall on them.

I used to believe it was just plain selfishness that caused some people not to want to help others. Maybe so in some cases, but I think most of the time people are just worried that somehow the whole thing is going to blow up on them and whatever it was they were expecting out of their country and their life is going to be unattainable.

We have this fantasy in America that with hard work and perseverance anyone can do anything. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a fantasy. It can happen. It does happen. But it certainly doesn’t happen to everyone, not even most. The thing is, we believe it can, and we don’t want to let go of that belief, that hope. It’s our national religion.

Even the heartiest individualist understands that the essential services government provides are the underpinnings of freedom and economic opportunity. But what, exactly, is essential? Police and fire protection? Roads? Electricity? Clean water and air? Most would agree on those. How about day care for single mothers? If you’re not a single mother, and don’t much think anyone should be, that may not be high on your list. Food stamps? If it came to it, you think you could find a way to put food on the table, so why can’t they? If you’re working hard and getting by, it can be difficult to put yourself in the place of someone who has lost his job and health benefits and wakes up one morning to find a lump under his arm that he’d never noticed before.

It’s not naked selfishness that’s behind what we take for a lack of compassion, a flinty ungenerousness, it is fear. Fear that what has made this country great, what has created the opportunity for all who came before, will bleed out of the national body through a million tiny puncture wounds inflicted by sloth, waste and fraud.

December is the giving season, the time we all gather round and watch “A Christmas Carol,” tut-tutting at what a mean and selfish man Ebenezer Scrooge is and smiling approvingly at his post-haunting epiphany. It’s his change of heart we applaud, his moral awakening. It would be a far less resonant story if the Ghosts of Christmas simply shook down old Scrooge for the price of the Cratchit family Christmas goose. Scrooge was a skinflint, alright, but it wouldn’t be right to force him to give to others. For it to be the right thing, for it to be something real and lasting, he had to want to do it himself.

That’s what a lot of people feel: that it’s not right to force them to give to others. Especially people they don’t know, people they suspect could do more for themselves if they just tried harder. They’re glad to give to the charity of their choice, but they don’t like paying taxes for social safety nets.

For many government is like a parent, and those people lined up to collect welfare are its children run wild. But what if one of them was your son? Would you turn your back on him? Probably not. Perhaps, though, neither would you rush in with an open checkbook every time he slipped. You’d want him to work it out himself if at all possible.

We’d all have a lot more confidence in government if we were sure it was operating this way. We’d be happier to trust it with our money. Let’s face it, we just don’t think government, particularly the federal government, is a very good parent. It’s too inattentive, too indulgent. We all know how kids of parents like that turn out.

Government has to regain our confidence. It’s not enough to say you want to help people in need, you have to show you know how to do it. You have to show you can tell someone who truly needs help from a charlatan gaming the system. Government hasn’t done enough to gain our confidence that it can do that. It has been aloof. It has been imperious. It has been wasteful. For proof, one need look no farther than the current Congress. Few among us any longer trust those gridlocked, preening pontificators to look after our common welfare.

Government needs to learn to be a better parent.  It needs to explain its decisions. It needs to make us feel they are fair and evenhanded. It needs to be a parent we can respect. Otherwise, the children are going to keep running away from home.