Making Paper Sacred

WHEN HOMO SAPIENS invented writing and reading, it was very pleased and impressed with itself, and has remained so ever since. When i was eighteen, i shoved a scorecard in the face of a grumbling yogi berra, and he scribbled his autograph as if doing so were a great annoyance, which it surely was, since his team had just lost two games in one day.

That moment in my life set me straight about autographs; they are nothng but a  few scratches on a piece of paper, hardly worthy of pursuit. Elsewhere, among my fellow sapiens, autograph hounding remains popular, particularly in celebrity studded america.

we sometimes place such great value on a particular group of printed words that we start believing that god wrote the book, when we really ought to know better. all over the world are books which were allegedly written by god, or "inspired" by god.

"it is beyond me how anyone can believe that god speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not reveal itself directly to us, and  if our hearts do not tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we will most assuredly not find it in books, which, at best, are designed only to give names to our errors." -goethe

Will there come a time in a less enlightened future in which the united states constitution is believed to have been authored by the divine? One can only hope not, but the way the american people have treated the document for over two hundred years, one never knows.

The very question we ask the most about the american constitution is the one which probably matters the least; what did the framers, what did the founders mean by its words? Isn't it more relevant what we mean by them? Shouldn't we govern ourselves, rather than relying on people who have been dead for over two hundred years, and know nothing about our world today?

Thomas Jefferson believed that every new generation should suthor its own constitution, and would likely be amazed and horrified that we are still using the document his friend james madison authored.

Let's call a national convention and create a new constitution for ourselves, and the times in which we live!  We can still save the old one, and respect it all we want, but without having to agonize over whether james madison intended us to have the right to own an AK47, or whether black people are three fifths of five fifths of a human being.

While we're at it, perhaps we can get rid of the prohibition and the repeal of prohibition amendments. They sorta cancel each other out, don't they? Jefferson would be proud of us.