I woke up this morning with a word on my mind. The word was “mine.” What does it mean that something is “mine.” It struck me that there are a variety of things that are spoken of as mine. This key is mine. This wife is mine. This God is mine.

The key is physically mine. Or is it? It is the key to the car (mine!) and so it has a relationship to the car. Indeed, the key is useless without the car, and the car is useless without the key. The relationship the key has to the car really makes the key the car’s. As a unit, then, they are both mine. My relationship to the key has a built in relationship to the car as well. But it is a physical relationship of me to “thing.”

My wife is mine, but in a very much looser way than the car. My wife is a separate person with her own relationships, only one of which is me. She is not useless without me and I am not useless without her. Our relationship is a more interdependence than an ownership relationship, unlike the car and key.

My God is mine, but only in a relationship in which I am dependent for my very existence on Him. As is everything else that is kept in existence by the power or force of a creator. More accurately, I am His. I guess an artist in creating a painting always has a relationship to it as its creator even after he gives it up to others and it leaves him physically.

My nephew, when he was little, saw and internalized the J.C. Nichols statue in the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. He referred to it as “Mine fountain.” And in a way, it was. And though he is now over 40, I hope he still has the internal relationship with that fountain in his memory. Our memories seem to maintain all the relationships we form with things, persons, and bits of knowledge, words, images, and sounds.

As I get older I find myself craving less and less. I don’t really need things to be mine. I am starting to think of my being theirs. Except for money. That’s mine.

Well, the first pesidential debate is over. Interesting, but not a world changing event. Each candidate got to take potshots at the other, and both got to express some thoughts. One thing I still can't figure out. They both call out the other on his lack of "details" about future policy. This strikes me as odd because there are a couple of issues in that one statement about "details."

First, the president gives suggestions and policy principles but is not the "lawgiver" like Moses, or somene of that ilk. Oh, I know Obama wants to be and DOES issue laws of his own making, as well as undoing laws passed by congress and signed by a president. His "orders" to ignore enforcing some laws that he disagrees with are a shredding of the constitution, and his directives to his agencies to impliment policies that are just new laws that the executive branch is "passing" without congress. Pocket appointments of a congress that is still in session (technically) is another end run around the constitution. Etc. This has all been going on for so long by presidents over the last 40 or 50 years that I guess the public thinks that this is the way laws are passed. Since civics classes are passe (right?) there is no more schooling on how a law is created and passed, and the constitution is in shreds because of the two parts of government have assumed the role of creating laws (executive and judicial), the constitution is becoming null and void. Or at least moot.

Second, once the president has set down his suggestions, in a broad or narrow brush sort of way, with goals, policy guides, and his political desires in what I consider draft form, he is duty bound to submit his wishes to his paid consultants for their review and decision. These consultants should not b e confused with lobbyists who are paid by employers that have specific, special interest, and who want to affect the executive branch suggestions. No, I mean congress, all 535 consultants who are paid by the citizenry to represent them. The executive branch can certainly communicate with congress, apply pressures of various sorts, and as we have seen offer special deals to individual members to get the vote the executive wants, but this turns into a foul process after a while. The judicial branch hovers over all this to stand ready to stop any law that gets passed from violating a constitutional principle. This has deteriorated, however, into such open ended judgments that the constitution is hardly a barrier anymore to anything. Take for example the "fine is really a tax" conversion of the so-called Obamacare law (that was illegally introduced by the Senate) and you begin to see all three branches making laws.

And the result is a tyranny that the constitution was supposed to prevent. Ah me. Still, civilizations come and go, countries come and go, politicians and political parties come and go, and we ... well, we come and go. I might not like the changing parade, but it changes anyway. And one actually can't ever "go back" even though such talk is used to make people feel better. The United States had a long, torturous run, but it certainly looks like it is trouble. It has changed, and will continue to do so, but along with the rest of the world is is changing in such a way that anyone who has read some history will recall the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. There are some similarities, and the end results may end up the same. Something new will come along, and mankind may or may not survive.

You know, the Earth is in a far arm of a galaxy that turns once in 2 billion years and has turned more than twice already. "There has been joy. There will be joy again." Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man