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Before Brown vs. Board of Education, there was Plessy vs. Ferguson and thousands of black children were restricted to separate educational facilities, patently unequal in every resource: money, personnel, books, supplies, and expectations. Recourse was banned because Constitution countenanced such a lie.
Decades before Roe vs. Wade, doctors were fully competent to perform clinically safe abortions. Yet thousands of women died in backrooms, in Mexican hotel rooms, and in parlors of unlicensed midwives.
Each time a decision is made about what Constitution "really" means, someone gets hurt.
Abolition saved slaves but economically destroyed Old South. Desegregation of schools helped black children embrace hope of a better life but bankrupted marginal communities who already had severely limited resources. Legal abortion saved lives, and lifestyles, of thousands of women but destroyed possibilities inherent in those fetuses we threw so casually away.
It is in their recognition of power inherent in any one person's, or group's, ability to interpret Constitution for us all, that feuding Senators deserve our respect. On each side, they seek to protect their chosen electorate from "excesses" of other side. They feel responsible for averting emotional carnage that extreme views, of any persuasion, impose on general populace.
It would be easy to simply look at long haul and calculate that "everything will work out" in end. Unfortunately, long haul may mean many lifetimes and we have only one to live - "short term" incarnate.
It would behoove all of us, no matter our views, no matter our political position, to seek out and identify those our ideas would hurt and think, before we speak or act, how such harm might be minimalized.
Virginia Bola is a licensed clinical psychologist with deep interests in Social Psychology and politics. She has performed therapeutic services for more than 20 years and has studied the effects of cultural forces and employment on the individual. The author of an interactive workbook, The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a monthly ezine, The Worker's Edge, she can be reached at http://drvirginiabola.blogspot.com