a tree falls....

If Tree Falls in the Constitution and No One Hears it ……

I’ve been thinking about that old philosophical conundrum ---- if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it make a sound? In a variety of contexts it’s referred to constantly. There’s something profoundly silly about it. So anthropocentric. So arrogant. Surely sentient creatures --- bark beetles, a deer mice, downy woodpeckers, grubs --- register the tree’s crash. Actually, millions of creatures. The physical laws by which sound moves through vibrating air don’t require a human ear to make them work.

Wouldn’t it be the same to ask, if a primrose blooms in the desert and no one sees it, is it still beautiful? If no one smells it, is it fragrant? If a salmon swims up the Penobscot River and no one eats it, is it still a fish? If the salmon lays eggs and no one counts them, do they have a number? If the president refuses to allow the release of photos of Americans torturing prisoners, did it happen? If we wear earplugs, did the victims scream?

Or, ask the question this way: If someone obviously breaks a law and no one holds him accountable, in what sense does the law then exist?
Or, if an election is stolen and the Supreme Court and the Congress and the people ignore it, do you still have a democracy? If a president lies to the people and Congress about the reasons for waging war and he gets away with it, do you still have a legal system? If the FBI and the CIA wiretap civilians without warrants and call it necessary, does anyone have the right of privacy? If an administration justifies torture because they say it is useful, do you still have morality?

If your operating procedure becomes the general avoidance of your own laws and the people are encouraged to deny the relevance of their laws to the exigencies of the moment, then what exactly is your ethical address? Clearly, you don’t live, morally, in the place you say you do. And if you don’t, where are you? Haven’t you cast yourself into an outer dark --- and decided it’s for your own good? It’s as though we pretend we can take vacation from our ethical home, in fact, destroy that home, become self-imposed refugees, but can also return home when we feel the timing is right --- and the lights will still be on, the family photos still smiling from the walls. Oh, how comforting is such magical thinking!

Another way to look at it is this: Our ethics and morals and laws are like our protective clothing. We have been encouraged, with Dick Cheney holding our hands, to morally disrobe for our own good. The colder it gets, the more we should take off.

It’s as if we have been floating down a river on a raft of laws and ethics, and instead of protecting ourselves with this moral framework, keeping it maintained and buoyant, we’ve been keeping the crocodiles at bay by pealing laws and ethics off one by one and tossing them into voracious crocodile gullets. Pretty soon there’s no raft.

President Obama and the Democratic leadership might be thinking of the problem is terms of Sophie’s Choice. Sophie was given a “choice” by some Nazis in a concentration camp --- she could save one of her children if she gave up the other to the gas.
Which one?
Is this really a choice?
Whatever she does, her life is destroyed.
Is it too far fetched to compare what President Obama is suggesting about not prosecuting our home grown torturers & war criminals? He says to defend our “core values” we need to get on with the country’s business and not look back. Let them have one of the kids. That is, choose not to prosecute and thereby sacrifice the law, our morality. Obama suggests that to adhere to the law is to delay his agenda. What agenda item could be more important than maintaining out integrity?

Sometime last fall I began to slip into a funk worse than that caused by Bush years. I could see that it was likely that McCain would lose, that Obama would win, and that many millions of people would be ecstatic, people who would tell me that I should be, too. What I began to sense was that Mr. Obama was not intending to change the system or disown all the policies that had created the criminal behavior of the Bush administration. It was not that his victory was not a watershed event --- the US elects an African –American! --- but it didn’t change systemic racism. And in that same way Mr. Obama is not going after the root causes of the systemic problems with the environment, the economy, energy, war, health care, education and a political system fatally corrupted by money. One might say that this country changes by reform and compromise, not revolutionary change. That would be partly right. But the earth will not recover by reform and compromise. For the earth reform and compromise are simply criteria for how fast it will be destroyed. Nature does not compromise. It absorbs and absorbs insult until it doesn’t.

A citizen should understand that politicians have to compromise, but we citizens are not supposed to compromise for them --- especially, when it is about a principle, not about two worthy goals competing for the same money. When politicians compromise away their (our) humanity by accepting collateral damage, the citizen is under no obligation to compromise his soul away --- only to object. For instance, today the families of the dead collaterals are being paid lump (excellent term!) sums for their dead. $2,000 in Afghanistan. This is curious. Not the amount of money --- which is an insult --- but isn’t it akin to hiring people to die so that you can go on with your policy of indiscriminate death? When a politician calls such deaths “regrettable”, but does nothing to change the fact of the policy that is murdering them, what is really happening. What is the nature of that compromise?

The abandonment of our morality and integrity was transacted in a similar fashion. The bailouts & the stimulus being the lump sums we accepted to forget that we ever had standards we loved. We accept handouts, of our own money, in order that we might also accept our de-humanization. We promise not to hear the tree falling.