Original Intent

 I had a slow Wednesday - not really a bad one, but one spent waiting, and then napping, until my expectations for visitors came to an end.

 Justices Scalia and then Alito and Thomas have made much of original intent when interpreting our Constitution. I never thought the idea intellectually valid as anything but a starting point. Reading Tom Jones's Fatherly Virtue in The Roman and American Republic (Antigone) was mildly interesting until I got to this paragraph:

Yet it is precisely in such moments, when private love collides with public duty, that the true weight of republican virtue is revealed. The Founding Fathers, steeped in their Livy, would have recognised that in the American tradition, as in the Roman, the republic survives only when its citizens place the law above blood, the common good above personal cost and the public principle over private preference. Demands for sacrifice of this scale are, thankfully, remarkable in their rareness, but if a people are without the will to place duty above self, then a republic is without that which makes it worth defending. Its heart beats only so long as there are citizens who will bleed for it. 

This is not the original intent of our Supreme Court Justices; it is certainly not a concept known to Donald J. Trump, or his cronies. For them, anything that does not benefit them is worthless, even if it is a benefit to the republic. Why do we not teach these kinds of ethics to our young?

sch 9/23