So I was at the Indian Restaurant the other day during the all-you-can-eat buffet. It's a great restaurant, but there's a huge amount of waste. People just slop on huge amounts of food and never finish it all. I did overhear an interesting convolution of a common idea at a different table where a little girl sat with a massive plate of samosas, saffron rice and nan bread racked up like one of those Richard Dreyfuss-Close Encounters of the Third Kind Mashed potato plate piles. Her mom stared at her tiny eyes peeping over this engineering marvel of a plate of food.
Mom: Eat all your dinner, sweetheart. Little girls in India are starving.
I spent so much time thinking about where that entire thing sat on the irony wheel, I forgot to eat. I was thinking about how much Mutter Panir I could eat if I really put my mind to it. It's just peas and cheese. The peas deflate in your stomach and the cheese gets ground up and moves out of the way. There is a potential for a truly epic act of consumption there.
What a freaky crazy question, this buffet seems to be phrased as: All you CAN eat. It's like a college hazing ritual challenge. How many goldfish CAN you stuff up your nose. Or the carnival. How many clowns CAN you stuff in a car. Or the Las Vegas international associated convention for Pornographic actors, artists and producers (PAAP, I guess). How many men CAN you bang in the space of a short 15 minute long video loop. Or how many gerbils CAN you convince to follow a cardboard tube into your rectum.
I should have stopped before we went there. At any rate, It's an easy phrase that yields some obvious problems. In reality, what they're saying is "All you CARE TO eat". This is a little less of a challenge. It doesn't say, between the lines "Please stuff your plate so full of crap that dinner ends up sponsored by John Deere just so that you can get your money's worth". Maybe if we phrased it this way, every buffet in North America wouldn't end up looking like a Reality TV based Ethnic Pie-eating contest.
This is what freedom looks like sometimes. Chaos. Tell someone they're free to eat as much as they want and they will take it as a mandate to eat as much as they can. Mostly because we were designed by nature to maximize our freedoms so that we might be advantaged in the event those freedoms disappeared tomorrow. We don't leave food behind unless we absolutely know food will be there tomorrow. When we say "designed by nature" we are really saying here "More like to be descended from someone who did this than not". This is the problem with law sometimes. People believe that law describes everything they SHOULD do. In reality, law describes a subset of the things you should NOT DO that are extreme enough to warrant restricting your rights over. The law should not impact you on a day to day basis. That's not its job. Law is not the default. Law is the exception.
Notice, when you read the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, it doesn't mention what rights the government is giving us. It doesn't give us anything, in fact. It mentions SOME of the things the government is restricted from doing TO US. This is just as important as the 'Can Eat/Care to Eat" contrast. The Bill of Rights is a list of some of the things our government can't do to us and our inalienable rights. They can't make law regarding this, can't infringe that, can't quarter people here, can't violate this right, can't hold people this way, etc.
These aren't the only things that the government can't do to our rights. How do I know that? Because it says so in number 9. Number 9 essentially says, "Just because we talked only about these rights doesn't mean that there are no others". And the rights granted the government are NOT default to the government. How do I know this? It says so in number 10. Number 10 essentially says "If we haven't talked about a right it in this document, it reverts back to the people or the local governments."
The constitution is an INTENTIONALLY elliptical document. Because the framers knew that there was no way to catalogue completely all the rights that the people are meant to have, only to catalogue the only ways that the government can, somehow or another, to promote some good, mitigate one or two of those inalienable rights.
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What is clear to many people interested in the constitution, including myself, is that the intent of these amendments, taken as a whole, is to describe a right that can be summed up easily. The right for us to be a private people, in control of ourselves. The clincher to this assertion involves the wording of future amendments. The 14 amendment, for example, the wording of which is fairly explicit in regards to this. "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This reads very much to many constitutional scholars as a long way of saying 'Leave us alone unless you absolutely have to".
This is the interesting part to me. Even if you don't support the idea that the framers of the constitution meant to suggest that we are a free people with our native privacy left intact, you have to accept what is NOT in the constitution. What is not there is a provision for the government to intentionally invade the privacy of your body. This leaves us with three possible positions in regards to the constitutional right to privacy.
1. The constitutional amendments are worded in such a way as to support a derived right to privacy and personal autonomy over your body. This is the cumulative intent of the amendments.
2. The constitution is silent on the issue of personal privacy. That this right is one of millions of rights guaranteed by the constitution by default by not outlining a clear way for the government to mitigate it.
3. The constitution somehow, even though it is not expressly mentioned, gives the government the ability to violate your privacy over your body, despite the fact that every other ability retained by the government to violate your privacy is intentionally and explicitly laid out.
If number 3 sounds silly, it's because I was maximizing the silly when I wrote it. But, honestly that is the ideological disease that afflicts many people in this country, including Samuel Alito, The current nominee for Supreme court Justice.
I hate to get into the fortunetelling line of work, but, unless some civil libertarian grows a spine in the Senate or Alito is caught playing naked tag with schoolkids sporting an erection in full view of 27 privately owned independent foreign media correspondents' cameras, he is going to be confirmed. And the two positions he's espoused that frighten me the most- One suggesting that checks on executive power are unnecessary and one suggesting that the constitution somehow magically inverts our native inalienable right to privacy over our bodies - are about to be a permanent fixture on the Supreme court over the course of the next 50 or so years he might be with us, good genetics and moderate medical advances permitting. We're about to get all we can eat- for years to come- of these positions.
When the government refuses to acknowledge the right to autonomy of the individual over their own body, what we see are a chain of convoluted invasions of our liberties.
--When husbands want to make medical decisions and let their brain dead wives off of life support so they can die with dignity, the government engages to tell them they can't at a huge expense to the taxpayer.
--When young girls want to terminate their pregnancies without having to have high-priced family doctors work for them in secret, the government engages to tell them they can't at a huge expense to the taxpayer.
--When individuals in pain, at the end of their lives, want to painlessly end their lives on their own terms, the government engages to tell them they can't at a huge expense to the taxpayer.
--When individuals want to enjoy their bodies consensually and make each other feel good in a configuration that is different than what is mandated by the culture, gay relationships, groups, etc, the government engages to tell them they can't at a huge expense to the taxpayer.
Again, at the risk of having to join the psychics union 305, we're about to see an explosion of expensive and invasive assaults on the personal body liberties of the citizens of the US. This is how your tax dollars will be spent, in an endless cycle of irredeemable waste and pointlessness. This administration, Bush's administration, has positioned itself in opposition to the constitution already with a series of illegal wiretaps, preemptive warmongering and violations of protestor's rights. This new wave of assaults is coming and they won't be violations of your speech rights, but instead a violation of your body rights. The time will be coming very soon where we will wish that all we had to worry about was losing our right to protest in clear view of the president. This is a time when our bodies will be under attack.
Could we have predicted this 5 years ago? That the government would change the legal guidelines for handling rape victims and remove all mention of emergency contraception? That those same emergency contraceptive pills would no longer be able to be found by women who have them prescribed for them because their government doesn't think they have the right to health care options, even when they pay for them? That the government would spend millions of dollars of resources and time trying to violate a husband's right to make medical decisions for his wife? Now that we've seen what lengths they are willing to go to in order to remove from us our rights to our own bodies, it may be time for us to start seeing the future. A future where our right to privacy over our own bodies is contested completely.
Then maybe, there WILL be a legal restriction on "all you can eat".
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