Laws of Sand

A very old parable, one that goes back to – oh, let’s say around 30 AD – talks about the foolish builder who built his house on sand. The rains poured down and washed his house away. “And mighty was its fall.”

Meanwhile, a wise man built his house on rock. The rains poured down and beat upon the house. The winds blew mightily against it. The floods came. No matter what happened, the house stood firm and steady against the elements.

Our forefathers were surely flawed – slave owners, misogynists, oligarchs – and yet they worked together tirelessly to create a visionary set of laws to guide our democracy, “and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” The Constitution they passed down to us has lasted for nearly 250 years. It has been able to respond to such storms as the Civil War, twelve million immigrants coming to Ellis Island, the civil rights movement, the war on poverty and countless war protests. It has been a house built on rock.

Now, however, much of what is happening among elected politicians is a process of dismantling laws because they make our representatives personally unhappy. Maybe they do not represent their own religion’s teaching or their own family’s values. Maybe they curtail the amount of wealth they thought they could accrue.

Sometimes it feels as if our elected representatives believe they are in a race against time to see how many laws they can put in place to benefit their own situations and the old order of things before the winds of change blow everything away. Rather than working together to establish laws to benefit generations to come, elected officials are behaving as if they do not want a democracy, as if they would prefer to live in a country governed by authoritarian rule, or by an oligarchy where the richest, whitest males determine what is best for the country.

Mitch McConnell is fond of telling people that his proudest achievement is obstructing Obama’s right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.  This is not a man who loves democracy and works to improve upon the lives of the Kentuckians who voted him into office. This is a man who has been corrupted by power to the point of talking gleefully about subverting the Constitution.

Women’s reproductive rights are being bound and rope tied, “once and for all,” as some men have said – by rich white men in power. State legislators have been restricting women’s access to abortions all across the country. The President is defunding any women’s health care clinic, here and around the globe, that even mentions abortion or reproductive rights. This is a man who would not support a global effort to promote breast feeding – because it would take dollars away from the manufacturers of infant formula. In fact, nothing has happened in this administration to address the needs of the female half of the population.

Voter suppression laws – requiring photo IDs, making last-minute changes to traditional voting venues, not verifying provisional votes, cutting back on the hours polling places are open, disenfranchising voters with criminal records, making people “earn” the right to vote – illustrate how republicans circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and ensure that the poor and marginalized remain poor and marginalized.

Several elected representatives support Christian teachings in public schools.  (Constitutional Amendment #1: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .”). The Koch brothers have been giving enormous chunks of their wealth to colleges – in exchange for hiring professors who will teach only ideas consistent with conservative doctrine. Other white power brokers want textbooks for K – 12 that erase or rewrite Native American genocide, the history of American enslavement of Africans and the Jewish holocaust.

These may be viewed as lawful activities, but they are made of sand. They will not endure. In order for laws to endure, they have to be based on logic and reason rather than belief. (The use of logic and reason is eloquently illustrated by The Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident. . .”). Laws also have to marshal the facts – bringing the cold, hard facts altogether in one place, not just the facts one side prefers to cite. Facts, in turn, need to be viewed in the light of their moral and spiritual implications. And then, in order to be made rock solid, laws have to involve input from the people they will impact.

That’s all of the people. No exceptions. That’s why we have a Congress of elected representatives: so that the voices of all of the people are heard and taken into account.

What we have never gotten right, as a democracy, is the process of having everyone’s voice count. Sorry, men. Sorry oligarchs and conservative Christians. Sorry white people. Democracy means that your beliefs and wishes would not matter more than anyone else’s. In a democracy, decisions that need to be made about how we are governed would have to be developed from more than a white, male, privileged perspective.

Try to imagine that among our total of 122 major sports teams – baseball, basketball, hockey and football – we had a random distribution of owners who are female, black, Hispanic, Native American, male and disabled. Now try to imagine the board room discussions about responding to Colin Kaepernick’s protest. It is very doubtful that the refusal to stand for the National Anthem would have been outlawed by owners who themselves have had to confront the daily prejudices and privileges of a dominant white society.

Try to imagine that laws governing health care in this country are written by an equal representation of males and females, young and old, able-bodied and disabled, of all ethnicities. Better yet, try to imagine that among the people sitting around that table to write those laws are the poor and disenfranchised. That is a far cry from the manner in which Republicans tried drafting their own health care plan – meeting behind closed doors, using only the views of the elite and even barring communication with Democratic legislative leaders.

Imagine if Roseanne Barr’s racist assault against Valerie Jarrett had fallen on the ears of white male television executives who had become fossilized in their CEO positions. Instead, the head of the TV station that employed Roseanne happens to be a young, black woman, who quickly gave her the boot.

The current administration believes that it can completely undo Obama’s legacy by writing executive orders. It can roll back decades of environmental protections and wipe inconvenient truths off of government web sites. The voices of the oil industry and Wall Street have been invited into cabinet posts and allowed to erase consumer protections that took decades of bipartisan effort to create.

If we had been enlightened enough to elect a diversity of voices since the Constitution was written, this wouldn’t be happening. If, for example, Native Americans had had a place at the legislative table since the beginning, the environmental laws on the books would look much more stringent and much more embedded in daily life (not just about industry). Our environmental sustainability would be decades ahead of where it is now. Efforts to destroy National Parks and sacred lands would be deemed insane.

If women of all colors had been represented in equal measure in state and federal positions, we would not be having 21^st century discussions about women’s reproductive rights, healthy school lunch programs, the value of preschool education or paid parental leave. Children would not be torn out of their mothers arms by Gestapo-like ICE agents. Black families would not be living in a police state in which routine activities make their children and grandchildren subject to wrongful death.

It feels like we are mired in the dark ages of democracy. For a long, long time, many of the people we have elected to public office have failed to grow out of the confines of their own belief system, have failed to include the rest of us in their deliberations. They have instead, been using the laws to satisfy their own purposes. The less attention given to including everyone, the more we spiral downward.

No wonder I grinned at news that ABC president Channing Dungey fired Roseanne. No wonder I take delight in the number of women running for office right now. About 900 women contacted Emily’s List the year before Trump was elected. A year after his election, 26,000 women and still counting had sought help from the agency in running for office. No wonder I feel great joy in the growing presence of Native Americans in our environmental crises, and the presence of our youth in public discussions of gun control, and the growing visibility of Muslims, LQBTQ folk and people of all colors and ethnicities in elective offices.

It is possible, just possible, that we are about to blow away the laws of sand and rebuild them on a bed of rock.