Afterward

 Sunrise on my terrace and reflections on SCOTUS

I'm here for some distance to be with my thoughts and memories when I think about the two cities I love.  Two very important cities that also have an important relationship with each other, going all the way back to our young democracies. Inside each city of course are important relationships one to another.  It is in cities that our humanity is most keenly tested, as we live large in cities in big broad strokes.  It is in cities that our humanity resides, wherein we work on it because we are up against each other, every day.  We live on top of one another, we see each other's foibles, we are each other's foibles. Urban is loud, noisy, messy, honest.

Being detached from reality, sweeping things under the rug is not only bad policy, it's bad government. it's inhumane and it's dangerous.  SCOTUS took away a basic human right, autonomy over our own body, a woman's right to choose the right life for herself.  The majority of the justices demonstrated their complete disconnect to well, so much.

First Humanity.  

Perhaps this should be inscribed in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court.  Call it Humanity 2.0

"May all beings everywhere be enabled to carry out their lives in peace and happiness."

Second the Individual

C.S. Lewis says that, in the middle you don't see the center, because it's all center.   Each individual is the heart of the universe."

Out on this little island the feeling is expansive, back home in my big city I feel the center.  It's all center.  Everything is together, everything is one and that is where the work begins.  

This week showed us in rarefied isolated chambers is not where the gritty messy difficult work, connecting to our humanity, is accomplished.  Of course there are justices now and past who could couple keen intellect with a compassionate and open heart, however extremists who put themselves in isolation because that is where they feel comfortable have no right to impose laws over our autonomy because it makes them feel better and their lives less messy.

Third

I will never stop engaging for progress and a future that is just and fair.  Justices take off your medieval robes, your medieval mores, get out of your chambers and closets and jump into this big, gorgeous messy world.  See and then know; how and also where humanity resides.  It clearly is not your place to have done what you did.  In 2000, or today.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C. S. Lewis