Masters and slaves

My friend Kurt forwarded the Master / Slave article from Snopes Tuesday morning, and I wrote up a rant and was just about to post it when I realized that perhaps I was taking the wrong approach.

My initial reaction was one of scorn. As in... these people are too stupid to be allowed to run anything, much less a city. In many respects, that's wrong. These people are not stupid, they are simply approaching the problem in exactly the wrong way. We've been doing this just say no thing for so long everyone thinks this is the only way to do things.

Eliminating the terms master and slave from our vocabulary (as if that were possible) would not do one single useful thing but it would ensure that we could no longer effectively communicate the idea of one master and one (or more) slaves which are completely subservient to the master. No more history lessons for youngsters about master/slave relationships; we're tossing the concept... I guess US history will need to start around 1920 and we'll just skip world history altogether. All those mean and nasty people.

This is obviously a foolish approach, so why do we do this sort of thing to ourselves?

It will always be easier to eliminate by rule rather than educate by clearly expressed statements of intent.

If you don't like something it's not hard to find enough people to push for making it illegal (and given enough marketing push you can fool enough of the people for long enough to make a law). In general, it's because we (the United States) no longer attempt to define our beliefs in such a clear way that anyone can interpret them and we can all stand behind them. We pass laws written in legalese because so many want language that is left open to interpretation; and in order to satisfy a bunch of special interests, we usually have a raft of "yeah, but" exceptions to the general rules (which were vague enough to begin with).

We are so busy, at every level of our government writing new laws that there is no way for anyone to follow and understand all of it. The traffic volume is too high, too distributed. Poorly considered laws sail through all the time, no one notices. Laws worth thinking about never get past the local nomination method (and unless someone has a good PR machine, no one notices). The end result? Laws that explain exactly what we can not do, while never exactly clarifying what we are allowed to do and laws that remove our ability to do things we've always done without getting into details (e.g. laws that make strategic changes to upper tier laws without ever getting into specifics like the USA Patriot Act).

We expect to tune nearly everything in our lives over time, why is government left out of the equation? What we don't do often enough is to factor legal complexity and invent ourselves anew. Constitutional amendments should be alive and well, but we've dropped that concept on the floor because we found a legal maneuver around it. Constitutional changes not only override federal and state laws once adopted, they also override all existing court decisions.

We've got to find a way to fix this...