AmERICan Fever

"Bella geri placuit nullos habitura triumphos. I hope this war shall be Christ's triumph, Babylon's ruin." Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex.

The digital thermometer that I bought in Manila is getting a lot of use. It reads in Celsius so I have to go to Google and convert it to Fahrenheit.   

I never really needed one except that time I contracted Lyme's Disease and my then wife had one. Tuesday afternoon I started to develop a cough. I felt chilly all day, which isn't unusual because my office has a HVAC vent that blows cold air on me 7:35 am to 3:00 pm. The maintenance director assures me that the air is 68 degrees. Think car window 68 degrees. The air is moving.

I don't recall the last time I have come down with the Flu. It was childhood/teenagerhood from what I recall. I am a Cold man pretty much and can count on a couple each Winter. One feature I recall about the Flu is that I get these really dead dreams, like me dreaming that I am sitting in a chair for hours. Well, that happened Tuesday night. There was something I was dreaming about that was existentially empty. I don't even recall the details. But, I was caught in it all night. That, along with my head feeling as if was being jack-hammered like a sidewalk, and I knew something was up.

I called off of work, got to Urgent Care, am taking an anti-viral, and after Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of being in the hole (think Andy in solitary confinement in Shawshank Redemption) I am feeling better. It has been a pretty rough 2018 so far. Fingers crossed that I can escape some of the maelstrom from this point forward. My Dad, until the Flu came on, was gently twisting my arm to get me to go to his Cabin 3.5 hours from here for the weekend. I was attempting to diplomatically brush him off before Wednesday. It was an ill-fated family reunion like the three hour tour of Gilligan's Island of sorts that wound up getting snowed out anyway. He had titled it something like "Cuzzins' Misery Weekend" or something ill-appealing and I deferred noting that I had already had enough misery recently and really didn't need to top off the trouble tank.

The Flu allowed me to escape that familial obligation cleanly. Silver linings, indeed.

So, I had three days and nights to recuperate. It was a respiratory Flu, not gastrointestinal. So, I was hacking, blowing my nose, and my head hurt. I watched a lot of CSPAN 2. The primary programming was about the Senate's debate on DACA and the Dreamers (undocumented parents brought them as children to the United States). 90% of Americans agree that these young adults and children should have a path to citizenship. These days, 90% consensus on an important political issue is a rarity. OK, nearly impossible.

I agree that the DACA issue should be resolved legislatively. I understand why Obama issued an Executive Order on it as it was the Republican's stated objective the day he stepped into the presidency to make him a one-term president and oppose everything he had on his agenda. So, Trump, as much as I hate to admit it, was correct to punt it back to the Congress because that is where law is supposed to be crafted constitutionally, not the Judicial or Executive branches.

The problem is the Republicans, to one degree or another, see DACA as part of a bigger immigration policy debate (which it is and isn't). It is in the sense that these young adults and children are undocumented, but it isn't, because they are already here and the wall--real or imagined--has zero bearing on their status. The Democrats want to pass DACA legislation and deal with the more contentious part of immigration reform later on, if ever. The Republicans refuse to drop the DACA leverage so hence the current stalemate. After the first week of March, all hell could break loose with DACA kids being deported. I don't put it beyond Trump to start deporting these kids which the Democrats will dare him to do. In other words, this could be a train-wreck.

At that tail-end of the DACA debate, the news of the school shooting in Florida happened. Once kids are again front and center of a debate between adults who cannot see eye-to-eye and work-out livable compromises. Politics has become all or nothing. Meaningful gun reform will not come internally within the Congress. It will have to be driven from the outside.

My take is that there are several legal loopholes that must be tightened up including first of all the ability to track down where guns are coming from. I don't know the technology capacity but each gun must be able to be tracked to its source of purchase through some infallible identification of the firearm that cannot be disabled. That will begin to slow down the rate of new guns falling into wrong hands through straw purchasers. Second, require all gun purchasers to be 21. The ages of 18-21 are still high-risk years. We do it for alcohol with no illusion that it is going to stop all underage drinking. It just makes it harder to obtain it.  Third, school offenses that are violent must involve the police and be treated as criminal offenses. Teenagers have to be told that given the current state of our country, we can no longer have the attitude that "boys will be boys."  Just to be fair, girls get in knock-down fights too but so far, nearly all of these high-profile mass-shootings have been by males. These criminal offenses must be flagged during gun purchases, and not just from licensed dealers. Private sales of guns should also now have to be reported.

There is a lot of debate about what the Founding Fathers meant about the latitude of the 2nd Amendment but the "well-regulated militia" is the key. The Founders were afraid of both invasion from the British and a standing domestic Army.  A militia was seen as the bulwark to both threats. The War of 1812 showed the weakness of the militia strategy but that was the purpose of gun rights, in addition to shooting game and native peoples.

Imperial Rome, from my limited reading of it, came about because of the entrenched corruptions of the Senate. Caesars stepped into the Rubicon void. With the inability to resolve questions of governance, chaos is the plow that sows the seeds for totalitarianism. The next month or so should demonstrate whether the United States still has the capacity to self-rule. All the while, Vlad chuckles. The Berlin Wall may have come down a piece of concrete at a time but is has also released malediction into the air. We have the Flu and the fever is rising. We either take steps to counter it or hold onto your hats, we are in for a rough ride. Presided over by DT who seems more than ready to crash it.  And not in some calculated let's let the fever do its work. No, just pedal to the floor brick wall.  We won't be the first civilization to die but it won't be fun. To be safe, learn Chinese. They are going to need American co-conspirators. 

Post-Script: I don't like to write and not provide hope. Both Republicans and Democrats are at-fault for the current state of affairs. Both parties are beholden to special interests that are small statistically in number but which have a lot of power and money. These extreme voices, for their own purposes, are driving the agenda for their own benefit. I see no way out of the current death spiral besides term limits. We must periodically clean house and put clean straw down. There should be a large pool of staffers who can help provide internal know-how but we must have credible outsiders whose careers have not been law school to politics anymore. "While 0.6 of the U.S. adult population are lawyers, 41% of the 113th Congress are. Members of Congress are 68 times as likely as all American adults to have practiced law." (from Measure of America)