The Second Amendment

So as it happens, the urge to offer travel commentary in Germany didn't strike me all that often, and this blog might have been forgotten after its first post. I'm sure that anyone who may have ever found their way here through my facebook profile or whatever has certainly given up on this blog by now. And yet, as I re-read my first post, I've decided that it's simply too clever not to merit some follow-up. So, now that I am back in the United States, I am going to try this again. Perhaps I'll manage to regain a bit of an audience. Failing that, someone has to provide those archaeologists with their material!

This being the second post on this blog, it seems fitting to offer a few thoughts about the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. I notice that the Supreme Court has recently interpreted this amendment to mean that individuals have the right to keep loaded and assembled handguns in their homes, striking down a Washington D.C. law prohibiting this. The responses of persons quoted in the yahoo article to which I have linked are rather predictable. The White House is fairly measured in its praise of the decision, but the idiot beloved child of God who brought the suit and the NRA are overjoyed. Senator Feinstein (D-CA) believes the ruling will make the American people less safe.

I am entirely in agreement with this sentiment of Sen. Feinstein. I think that keeping loaded and assembled weapons in one's home is just asking for trouble, especially if there are children who reside there. If it were up to me, people would take martial arts instead of buying handguns. That would probably make us both safer and healthier. That said, I think the majority opinion in this case is correct. I'm no lawyer, of course, but the arguments based on the "well-regulated militia" clause have always seemed a bit of a stretch to me. I wish it were not the case, but it seems to me that it is. I felt the same way a couple years ago when the more liberal justices ruled that eminent domain could be invoked by a municipality to take a property for private use. I really hate that decision (my family's livelihood comes mostly from real estate), and I cared enough about it to actually read the text of the majority opinion. And though I think the world would be much better if eminent domain could only exercised for public use, I couldn't argue with the logic.

I point all this out because whenever the Supreme Court (or any court, really) hands down a controversial decision, the spokespersons for the organizations for and against the matter at hand almost always go on about how good or bad idea whatever has been prohibited or allowed is, but they almost never say anything about the constitutional merits of the case. It seems that outside of legal circles, most people are unable to make a distinction between what is right and what is constitutional, and this probably makes our discourse much less productive than it might otherwise be.

I am not advocating any sort of strict constructionism, by the way. I favor a very liberal interpretation of the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment, for example. Unfortunately though, the document that I believe guarantees Americans equal treatment and basic civil liberties also seems to guarantee the freedom of handgun ownership and gives governments more latitude than I would like in the exercise of eminent domain. It should be amended on both counts, but in the meantime, we need to work on our ability to distinguish a constitutionally sound opinion and a good or wise law.

"Surely the people are grass."

I pity the archaeologists of the future.

In the known history of the human race before the late 20th century, it has normally been the case that the chronicles and memorials of that have been written down so that our deeds might not be forgotten and our mistakes not repeated have been lost to fire, decay, or the negligence of scribes and monks who thought the latest tabloids (or the ancient or medieval equivalents) were more worth saving. We therefore reconstruct the history of the ancient word based on grocery lists. We mustn't be too hard on the monks and scribes though; if not for them, we wouldn't have anything to go on. But perhaps the archaeologists of the future will have the opposite problem. In antiquity, most people were illiterate, and writing was much more of an ordeal. Today though, literacy rates are quite high in the developed world, and not only is paper cheap, but any old fool can generate online what would have once been mountains of text. Assuming the internet doesn't fall victim to moth and rust (by no means a certain assumption), future archaeologists will have to sift through all of this crap, most of which they will find utterly trivial.

And yet, trivial or not, I feel perfectly content to add my own text to the digital landfill. In the past, I have kept a theology blog, which I have enjoyed doing. But I don't update it very often, because frankly, I just can't think of that many interesting things to say about theology, and when I do think of them, I'm rarely near my computer. So this blog is an attempt to share my thoughts with the world more regularly, and on a wider range of topics. There will no doubt be plenty of religious banter (after all, the blog takes is name from a Bible verse), but also expect a bit of travel commentary (I'm in Germany at the moment), the occasional political musing (Obama '08!), and whatever else strikes my fancy.

We are a race of animals that never tires of telling stories about ourselves. We listen eagerly to the great feats of old and repeat what we have heard, sometimes improving the story a bit. But the people in our stories don't know that they're in them. They are simply living their lives, doing what they must do to fend off starvation, or sometimes to save the world. Most of the story doesn't make it into the books or the epics. Think of every day Odysseus spent on the sea without incident, or every day Harry, Ron, and Hermione don't find a clue about a horcrux. In the Bible, the vast majority of the history of the human race is told in genealogies. We only know names, if that. And yet, this is the history of the human race, and it was in this history that the Word of God became incarnate. Thus, all of our daily struggles are both trivial and of the utmost importance. We are like grasshoppers to God, and yet God bears our flesh. Whatever blades of grass I take to examining in this blog, they will be examined with this tension in mind: that it is both trivial and of the utmost importance.

And if you are an archaeologist reading this as an artifact of the early 21st century, I'm very sorry. Welcome to my blog.