A Tale Of Two Courts: Roe v Wade and Prorogation

After the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the attorney general in the United States and the President of United States said the decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade was wrong.

On 28 August 2019, the Parliament of the United Kingdom was ordered to be prorogued by Queen Elizabeth II upon the advice of the Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson. Britain is a constitutional monarchy, meaning that the reigning monarch has little power, and ‘on the advice of’ is a particularly British way of saying the the prime minister ordered the Queen to prorogue Parliament.

A prorogation is the discontinue a session of Parliament without dissolving it. Johnson’s purpose in proroguing Parliament for an unusually extended period was to severely limit the time that the MPs in the House of Commons had to consider the Brexit Bill that was before it.

Concerned citizens raised a legal challenge and the Supreme Court ruled that the prorogation was unlawful.

Had Johnson’s Government given even the slimmest of reasons for their action, then the Supreme Court would not have looked to the adequacy of the reason. But the Government gave no reason, and that allowed the court to conclude that the reason for such a lengthy discontinuance was simply to deny Parliament time to carry out its function, and that that was unlawful.

Conservatives said the Supreme Court leaned too far to the Left, and was wrong to declare illegal the proroguing of parliament by the Conservative government.

If we start to say that one court is politicised and goes against the will of the people then where does it end?

Of course, some people would say – there are huge differences in the nature of the cases between in the USA and Britain.

Dig deeper, though, and the arguments are the same. The argument in the USA is that the Supreme Court has been packed with ultra-conservative judges with an avowed intention to come to conclusions other than the known general will of the people.

The argument in the UK is that the Supreme Court consists of members who are against the will of the people to ‘deliver Brexit’.

What is the same in both jurisdictions is that one of the foundational pillars of law is being attacked. There are routes to moving past unpopular decisions, but calling the court enemies of the will of the people is a dangerous road. It is a dangerous way to look at things because the will of the people is not a safe route to furthering the best in humanity anyway.

Making A Sand Mandala

In a Buddhist monastery in Nepal a group of seven or eight young monks were making a sand mandala. The mandala was in three levels, a large base level several feet across; another smaller level raised on support legs; and then a third, smaller level above that. I cannot remember what the bases were made of, perhaps thin sheets of wood or metal. But I remember the process they used to make the pattern on the mandala.

The monks were lying down around the mandala, each working on a part of the pattern. Each monk had a small tool that he used to release fine coloured sand in a precise manner. As they moved their tools along, the monks ‘drew or painted’ the sand on the bases, to make one highly detailed pattern in many colours. Mandalas follow an established pattern, which means that the monks are not designing it from scratch, but rather ‘painting by numbers’ as it were, but in sand.

The tool each of them used to release coloured sand was in two parts – a long, slim conical tube and a rod.

The sand was released from the conical tube, which was about a foot long. The coloured sand was loaded into the wide end, and came out of the narrow end. But the hole at the narrow end was extremely tiny. It was so tiny that a monk could ‘draw’ a fine line if he wanted, as he moved the tube along.

The hole was so tiny that the sand did not fall out of the narrow end of the tube under its own power of gravity. It had to be coaxed out of the tube, and for that the monks used rods several inches long. The conical tubes were smooth on the outside except for one section where the surface was made into small ridges and grooves running at right angles to the length of the tube. Together the ridges made a tiny staircase from the bottom to the top of the tool. The monks rubbed the rods gently back and forth over the ridges, and that coaxed the sand out of the tubes so that they were painting with sand.

Now, having got this far you may be wondering why I am devoting so much time to describing the process. Well, first the process is very painstaking and detailed. It takes effort, concentration, and patience to paint the design in sand and to fill in areas of colour with sand coming out of such a tiny hole in the end of the tube.

It is obvious that it would take days to finish. I can’t really remember the speed at which they were working, but maybe it would take them a week to complete it.

And the monks are working very close to one another and have to be aware of each other’s feet and legs and arms or they risk jerking or crashing into one another or the mandala and upsetting the pattern.

In order to make a sand mandala, the monks have to work together. If there was resentment, pride, superiority, or any sense of inequality in the mind of any one of them, it would set up tension. I think that would translate to the work and could be seen in the quality of the work. Pretty soon there’d be an accident and someone would knock against the design. I am sure the monks were all aware of that.

A mandala represents a truth, and its meaning is bound up in Buddhist teachings. Sand mandalas are ceremoniously thrown away, and that impermanence is essential to the purpose of their creation. So what the monks are working on inevitably brings about contemplation of themselves. The process of creating the mandala builds the ability of the monks to form a brotherly relationship. Someone could look at the building of good relationships as incidental to the creation of the mandala, or they could look at it as the very purpose for which the work was done.

shechen-monastery-in-boudhanath.

.

The Root Cause Of Self-Destructive Behaviour

Dostoyevsky, in Notes from Underground said that man will destroy perfection because he can. He might have said the following:

Call it fin de siècle, ennui, cynicism, pessimism, what you will, but things are not getting better. There is more depression with every passing year. And what is this better? ‘Better’ has a hollow ring. In a society with great disparities in wealth we are not all in the same boat, so why should I care? We are anyway doomed by our greed – climate change, polluted Earth. So you, who are careful about your health and behaviour and every shadow of the public conscience, will end a little later than I will, but I will burn with a bright spark while you, you goodie two shoes, live a perfect life – and who knows, my genes may protect me where yours do not despite your clean and careful living.

In the end we are all the same in our suffering. You have your problems and I have mine. And who are you to tell me? I can see any number of examples of so called shameless behaviour, so don’t try to shame me into feeling responsible for the whole of society It is you who is living in a fantasy world, while I live life to the full. And after all, aren’t we both driven by the same thing – to be sated, one way or another? And things are changing so fast, that what is good today will be bad tomorrow – and who knows where the race will take us?

Reply

We are all here against our will, and you have a responsibility not to add to the grief of those who feel responsible for looking after the wellbeing of anyone who needs it, to not add to their burden of having to decide who gets help and who does not.

It is bad for their psyche having to fight against a desire to ignore those who because of their own actions, brought themselves to be in need of help. Think about it, when you get diabetes or whatever disease you suffer from as a consequence of your profligate lifestyle, will you be so willing to live with the consequences without asking for help? I will be picking up the tab for your destructive choices.

In some societies I could say that if you don’t feel any responsibility then I will leave you to the mercies of X, who had no compunction in ending your life that is a drain on all of us – a drain caused by your own selfishness.

Reply back

I hear you. So give me something to believe in. Give me something, give me hope. What hope can you give me? What do you claim to know about the Great Plan and how it is going, and how we all going to be happy in the coming days. The days keep coming, but still they are not the coming days. The crowd is growing weary; it can see behind the magic trick and wonder when they are going to get theirs. Can you offer me anything?

Local Authority Housing: A Cautionary Tale

I think this can bear repeating:

The result of the right to buy legislation is the destruction of secure public housing – on of the pillars of the Welfare State.

I believe what happened over the past forty years since the introduction of the right to buy, is that the people who for the first time owned their own home believed that they had somehow become middle class with disposable assets – just that the value was tied up in the home. And they told themselves that as long as house prices increased and affordable mortgages were available, they could trade up when the credit card debt was too high. Of course, in the early years, credit cards were much more restrictive. And the amount one could borrow on a mortgage compared to one’s income was more restrictive. And similarly, the grounds upon which one could remortgage were also more restrictive.

Then credit loosened up, and at the same time holidays on the Costa del Sol and Turkey and wherever made it seem like there was no limit to what one could do. And then the cost of living, mortgages rates, house price crashes, and just poor money management by these babes in the wood resulted in people losing their homes.

The aspiring middle class with ready cash or mortgageable assets could now buy to let and take out mortgages to fund the purchase. Then the Government took away mortgage interest relief on buy to lets. So landlords sold. House prices had risen so much that as often as not the only buyers liquid enough to buy were the true middle class. And so the properties have become concentrated in fewer hands. And as an incentive to landlords, the long term rights of tenants were legislated away, leaving tenants with more anxiety and less will to complain about defects in properties.

Education, housing, and health care, the three pillars of the Welfare State, have been knocked down. We rail against the loss of the NHS, but I think the vision of being safe in a Local Authority house lost its flavour with many people. People wanted to own their own home in the new world of holidays abroad and call centres and Starbucks cafes. What has happened though, in the long arc of this evolution has been to remove Local Authorities housing as one of the three props of the Welfare State, and leave people less able to make ends meet and with nothing beyond their holiday snaps to show for the years they invested.