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There is an inherent right to life, yes. But it was stolen from the very pages of the Constitution many years ago by the trickster Brer Rabbit. His theft went all but unnoticed but for Thomas Jefferson, who was, they say, relieving himself out by the side of the Constitution's liberty hiding shack after a long night of rights-crafting and moral imperativization and through all the liquor a principled body needs for such delicate labors. And you had best believe that when he looked over his shoulder to the commotion of old Brer racing off into the night with a passel of self-evident principles clutched in his big rabbit teeth, he whooped himself a mighty holler, our man Jefferson, and he took after that rascal, fast as anybody can run while circumnavigating his manhood around pants what predate zippers. Racing through the night with the whole of human dignity in his mouth, that rascal Brer set forth for Benjamin Franklin's great moon ladder, which as any schoolchild knows was gifted him by Napoleon Bonaparte so that Franklin could climb to the moon, as was the fashion of the time. They climbed and they climbed and they climbed, did Jefferson and old Brer, up past the lowermost clouds and on through the middling clouds and then up on through the uppermost clouds. They climbed past where clouds are clouds up to where there's only the ideas of clouds, the floaty notions of future rainfalls. They climbed through the unanswered prayers of drought-blighted farmers, and they shouldered up past the dying cries of those who would drown in all the world's floods to come. They climbed until their brain-filled heads broke through the highest and most intangible, most perfectly inarticulate, unformed conceits of what precipitation and wind could ever be. They climbed on up and through to the moon, they say. They climbed up until the ladder fell out beneath them, up until they were lost to the phenomenal world as it is known. There's some what'll say they're still up there, that they made it to the moon's good hospitality. There's some'll say they chase one another around the lunar surface, through great space tunnels carved by Brer's ceaseless burrowing paws, and up and down all that jagged, cold, pale rock. There's those who will say if you can stare just perfectly through a night sky clear of potentialities and conceits, you can just barely perceive them chasing back and forth in the shadowy edges of your squinting eye. But then, there's those who will say most any foolish thing. My daddy always held unflinchingly to his conclusion that it was never Brer's intention to steal away the liberty of people. He always maintained by by paternal authority that Brer threw the rights of people into the darkest nascent storm he could find beneath the shadow of the moon, to spread grace on down to the world through the skies above, gliding to the earth on the wings of all the weather yet to come. He told me that's the reason why there's more and there's less dignity allowed to people at different times and places, that for all Brer's reckless gambit may liberated the idea of liberty from the grip of slavemongering hypocrites, it was done at some substantial cost. So to answer your question, yes, people have rights. They are woven through the very ceiling of the sky like the the fresco tints of the Sistine Chapel. The full measure of human dignity rains down upon us with the thundering of every storm that has yet to break.
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Feb 25, 2015 06:05
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 10:27 |
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What right has man to jive?
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Mar 9, 2015 18:44
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