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.

I belong to several traffic exchange sites (I willingly admit that I'm trying to sell a book) that require me to spend 20 to 30 seconds on other exchange program websites. I have no problem with, and actually admire, someone trying to sell me something, whether I want it or not. I even find myself sighing with relief when I reach a site selling an actual product, whether a bottle of pills, a newsletter, a gift, or an e-book.

What frustrates, exasperates, and eventually disgusts me, is webmaster out there who is not really selling anything tangible, merely selling reader on selling. How many ads have you encountered that want you to sign-up for "The List," "Marketing Secrets Revealed," or "Make $___ within 48 hours without lifting a finger." How many times have you clicked on a link only to find same theme: how you can make money off everyone else?

If everyone on net is there to make money, from whom are they making their living? Is there really a vast population of unwashed, sitting quietly reading their emails and surfing unending Websites, who exist just to buy stuff from these overzealous marketing gurus? Or does money simply rotate as marketers buy from marketers toward supreme goal of becoming a better marketer?

We live in information age where knowledge is power, details of both history and today's world are only a mouse click away, and ease of access to almost everything approaches speed of interplanetary travel. What productive use have we identified for all of this data?

Future archeologists, digging through our abandoned middens and long forgotten dumpsites, may finally stumble across our great weakness: that making money is be-all and end-all of life.

Shaking their heads in regret, they will publish their findings, reporting on a great civilization that eventually collapsed under weight of its own hype.