Street Seens: Gone but Not Forgotten
Truth teller alert. Every day I confess to being reminded that I am something of what is classically defined as “a pack rat.” As I enter battle each day with the avalanche of paper that is defying every instinct in a person born under the sign of Virgo to seek order, I confess that I am torn in considering the recent news report I read last week. It seems that there are whole teams of people we taxpayers are paying to retrieve and paste together the papers our President has torn up when he considered they were part of the past, but not of the future
As I survey the tragic consequences of keeping second, third and even fourth copies of documents I have freely created, I am forced to consider what it would have taken, bravely to deep six at least three of them. Or as my much more disciplined colleague Linda Carco would advise, transfer them to electronic form. Since she rightly guesses it is likely to be unthinkable for me to destroy them.
No doubt we have all observed President Trump tear a document in two before the television cameras. No “fake news” that! Though the President is no fan of the separation of powers. it remains that decades (perhaps even centuries) of practice honors the decision that Presidential statements, written, or electronically recorded have the weight of official statements and are to be preserved.
And so last week, I learned for the first time that long-suffering employees of our Federal government are being assigned to reassemble and make whole again the various documents President Trump may have torn for dramatic emphasis. The gestures might have played better in POTUS’s life as a reality TV performer but would not sit well with the employees whose job description as hardworking Federal employees is to make it possible for us and future generations to see and presumably rejoice in the documents that chronicle our heritage of freedom. With any luck these words will be available to be absorbed by future generations (likely all to be descended from immigrants). And with even greater luck they will be well thought-out, often eloquent and to be treasured for their role as champions of the power of the word in a free democracy.
I look forward to learning more about what the employees we hire with our tax dollars do, and what are their standards for success. I am most hopeful that our President might consider changing his M-O of tearing and disposing to a closer cooperation with the staff members charged with re-gluing, so that these great, detail-oriented professionals may better deploy their talents. But if not, they might be relocated into some currently under-staffed teams. Why not have them work, for instance, with minors detained after what is classically defined as kidnapped. Although they could not simply re-glue these hapless children to their parents, perhaps they could use their regluing skills to replace images of POTUS with images of the parents jailed elsewhere. There’s a chance that the guards in the windowless Walmart distribution facility and other buildings being used as holding areas for children, could be reminded that the children there are not criminals, but that they got there because they believed their fractured families to be asylum seekers.
In the interim, dare I say, one hopes for his sake that POTUS’ thumbs are not injured. Who should be charged to caution him to protect his thumbs unless and until he can be deterred from the ripping of documents? I’m neither a fan nor a supporter of tweeting which I see to be the great enemy of thoughtful conversation, but I can only imagine that paper cuts would be a significant issue for a fan of tweeting, even more dangerous than either general digital agility, or even worse: silence. It might even force proponents to engage in the very painful activity of dialogue while the paper cuts mend themselves.
I propose that it would be an excellent use of our financial resources if these document savers could piece together individual copies of the US Constitution, one per person for each person aspiring to become a documented and productive member of our democracy. Perhaps they could also include a copy of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans…..the whole thing. And, perhaps, they could append a copy of the United Methodist Church’s 21st Century commentary on Romans, written after our Constitution had evolved to abolish slavery (which the passage had earlier been used to justify). Gone, but definitely not forgotten.
