Our Constitution, Kicking Up Its Heels
There’s just so much talk these days about what can or can’t be done interpreting the Constitution, that it’s as if we had no say at all beyond good old Tom Jefferson’s brilliant mind.
But let’s face it, Tom lived in a thinly populated, agrarian society. There wasn’t an actual census taken until 1790, but the best guess is that our fledgling country fledged out at about 2.5 million. White folks, landed folks, but less than 1% of today’s population, in a time of horse-travel and virtually no consciousness of the rest of the world That world was also horse-traveling as best it could. Is a nation that isolated supposed to contain all the societal genes necessary for modern life in this complicated and crowded world? Did I say virtually? That word had a far different meaning in Tom’s day.
Virtual, derived from 14th century medieval Latin, now has as its 3rd meaning in the Encarta World Dictionary, “COMPUTING generated by computer: simulated by a computer for reasons of economics, conv…