There’s little doubt that the Texas Legislature will ratify the ”open carry” of guns before it closes its 2015 shenanigans.

So it’s no surprise that the Senate has by a hefty margin enacted a bill that would strip municipalities of their present right to tame traffic with cameras that nail the reckless drivers who run red lights. We nearly lost a grandson this winter when he followed a green light into an intersection only to be rammed by a car running the red light. Our grandson’s light Prius was declared totaled, but the other car never stopped. Because our grandson happily was not injured, the police made no official record of the accident, never bothering to look for the other car. Fortunately, insurance replaced our grandson’s car, but his premiums will increase through no fault of his own.

Municipalities are acutely aware of this never-ending danger. But the lawmakers in Austin could care less, since they are shielded from dissent, or unfriendly opinions at home, by their super-majority of Republican incumbents. So the red-light runners, accelerating at every yellow light, will go largely running free of arrest, with the toll of injury and death untallied in meaningful detail by an unrepentant state bureaucracy.

That’s the quirky paradox of Texas politics, in which it is hardly alone among States: so much passion for rights, much less for life itself. Price is not easily computed on life in the Dallas Metroplex, when its population is growing a hundred-thousand a year.

But when it comes to rights, there’s nothing bigger in Texas than the 2^nd Amendment. Never mind that it’s the most misconstrued article of the Bill of Rights. It’s premised on need for the Colonists to repulse continuing attempts by the British to recapture America, hence its predication on the importance of a native Militia. But that premise has never been lacking. Every State has built a proud National Guard, of volunteers, amply armed for any domestic menace, and proven time and time again in restoring order when in-state emergencies arise. Today, the National Guards collectively form the backbone of the American Army.

The majority of Americans grasp all this clearly. Nearly two-thirds of our homes are without firearms. But that hasn’t kept the National Rifle Association, with its pockets steadily fattened by gunmakers, from waging a constant blitz of the media, the legislatures and the Congress that would have visiting aliens believing that God loves guns. So who’s looking out for the peace of mind of the majority who would sleep better if their neighborhoods were gun-free? This might an opportunity for a new tax-free charity to push their cause. More families without guns undoubtedly would mean fewer lives erased or ruined by intentional or unintentional gun-play.

The idea that guns keep homes safer in this day of rocket and drone weaponry approaches the absurd. Weapons that can vaporize a whole residence in one shot are multiplying, and thanks to the NRA, no serious measures of regulation and protection are appearing.

Surely not in the Texas Legislature. We’ve already firmly resolved as mates, Dr. Bonny and I, that if we find ourselves dining in restaurants, when other guests appear packing heat on the hip, we will leave immediately, and make it clear to the owner that we won’t be back, if he continues to welcome “open carry” guests. And, it will be clear to any such guests that their open carry is exactly why we are leaving.

At the same time, I see open carry and demise of the red-light cameras as the same piece, in the Texas Legislature. Both are flat-out threats to public safety, and no serious data exist to prove otherwise. Both will go on running up deadly tolls, which Austin won’t be counted on to tally, as a public service. The only tallies most legislators follow are the percentages by which they win reelection. If death by gunplay or highway mishap means any more than road kill en route to keeping office and swishing about in Austin luxuries, we don’t hear about it. Maybe it’s because clear and serious minds are a vanishing luxury in Austin. So much passion there for small government, until it gets in the way.

Frank Mensel —May 2015

The Constitution has given representative government a bind the Founding Fathers never intended: an unelected official whose exercise of high office exceeds its intent, making him the most powerful lawmaker.

It could be any Justice of the Supreme Court, under the construct it presently bears. It gives the legal profession a sway over history that it hasn’t earned, and can’t because it is entirely human in its practice. Though the Constitution intended that Justice be served by the rule of law, we have instead in practice rule by the profession of the law. And it comes tainted with self-interest, underscored by the very human desire to eat well.

How else can the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision be explained? It held that a corporation has the same First Amendment protection that a person has, because a corporation qualifies as a person: after all,it is guided by a board of people. But any further resemblance is a long, long stretch. Does it have blue eyes, or brown? Does it part its hair left or right? Or is it bald? Who trims its toenails?

Moreover, how often does an individual’s wallet match a corporation’s? A few do. Here lies the crux. Some of the very rich are walking holding companies. They are twice leveraged by the First Amendment. When they speak as individuals, many admirers listen. They spin the same message then through their corporations, which are freed by Citizens United to spend whatever they please to do it.

It puts representative government and the Constitution in double jeopardy in the 21^st century, with WeThePeople too easily drowned out by corporate power. Which is just the way the multinationals are playing it, giving them essentially a free hand in global trade, leaving American workers pitted against the cheap labor of Asia, paced by the state-funded factories of China, thus also saddling the American economy with mountainous trade deficits.

The corporate powers have little to fear, since the legal system and the law profession are too easily tilted by money. The CEOs haven’t gotten where they are by failing to see the advantage that comes of retaining the most prestigious and influential law firms to protect their interests. So however much Citizens United bends the Constitution, it hardly comes as a surprise from a panel formed entirely of highly esteemed practitioners from this system.

Always startling is that decisions of such weight come on 5-4 votes. Whoever casts the deciding vote, which often in this century has been Justice Kennedy, that unelected official bears the most decisive hand of both government and history. It makes a strong case for a constitutional Amendment that allows the Court to change existing law or establish precedent only by votes of 6-3.

That’s the standard by which treaties are made, by which vetoes are overridden: actions that stand only if they’ve been ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. Serious turns of the law should require the same margin. That way no unelected Justice could reign at any moment as the most powerful hand of government. That way the Constitution would keep the balance that tripartite government intends. And no Justice would ever loom larger than Justice itself.

Frank Mensel — May 2015

Is the world inching toward the age that looms as its last hope: The Age of Women? It’s happening in the United States, as in other Western nations, and in some corners of Asia. But is there enough momentum to bring the world to a consensus of the senses, if you will, to keep the appetites of men from drowning us in climate change?

Much of the answer will flow from how they use their universal instrument of change where they have it: the vote. I’ve been saying this since well back in the last century. But it matters far more for women to say it, over and over and over. And far more yet when they vote their own interests ― as men have never feared of doing.

It’s been less than a century since the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the  States, to qualify women to vote. But they were hardly prepared then to use it in a concerted way. In the absence of the Amendment, they had no reason to organize, or flex their potential.

They knew that the Constitution promised equality and equal protection under law. But it has never come of its own accord. After all, they were less than citizens when the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the amendment reaffirming equal protection were adopted. They’ve learned at persistent pain that they get it when they step up and take it.   “Establish Justice.” Women are about it now. A good deal of history in this century will be written, belatedly, in this struggle.

To prove more adept at using their vote, women are pushing hard at an equal priority that’s bound to sharpen their use of the ballot box: education. American women have made themselves not only a majority of undergraduate students earning degrees, but a growing majority at the same time. Three of every five degrees awarded now are going to women.

Their numbers are growing in almost every graduate school. It won’t be long before gender balance will define the professions. And that is bound to change, in not so subtle ways, the way the law works. Going back to the Victorian model, the law has always worked as not the rule of law but rule by the profession of the law. Always dominated by men, fattening their wallets wherever possible.

This is bound to change as women fill more practices and more benches. For one thing, they will soon demand and get equal protection ― the old boys’ network be damned! If the old boys aren’t seeing this, they better wake up very soon. While they go on doting on football and the new playoff scheme, and the South East Conference proving that the South won the Civil War after all, the lingering  ripples of the Big Recession have more than leveled the workplace, tilting more and more jobs toward women, because they are better prepared, and pushing as they should for equal pay for equal work.

What is all this saying to the world?  What will it mean? Hopefully it will dawn on men that they have to compete now with more than men in the job world. Merit has increasingly replaced privilege in higher education, except in big conferences of  football and basketball, who never let admissions standards stand in the way of a potential star.

The bigger challenge in higher education is to get the focus back on learning as first and foremost priority.  Not learning for learning’s sake alone, but better matched to the challenges facing the globe, at home and abroad. With this focus, community colleges have grown into the largest network of undergraduate studies, at the same time keeping athletics a minor distraction. When will the universities get it right?

Higher education must also help us to realize that the future of a stable world does not lie in consumer economics, nor in corporate power. It should be making the most of science, and showing us the way to live better by living simpler. It’s the choice that is the hope of keeping choice in people’s hands, by which they map and steer their future. It’s their hope of keeping freedom alive in the world, of holding off the tyranny that ignorance, superstition, and excessive wealth want to foist upon us.

Churches have been with us long enough to show that they are not the answer. They are all man-made. We know that because there are so many of them. The more science tells us about the vastness of the universe and its astounding age, the more apparent it is that we are guests on the one inhabitable planet among the several of our small solar system, barely a scratch of what’s in store out there. However deep our faith about a post-earth fate, the great truth of our existence is the earth, which holds all the known keys to our survival and the goodness it can give us if we treat it right.

Women will have a profound role in this awakening, if we are to evolve life styles in which we live with less threat of self-inflicted extinction. Women have been conditioned over centuries to think first of the family. It’s the inevitable bearing that goes with pregnancy and motherhood.

It will be American women who form the model and set the pace in this awakening. They must claim sole voice for personal health decisions. Unmitigated and unfettered procreation can only expand the vast legions of both the homeless and the unwanted children, which are another growing pale upon the world. American women are showing women everywhere that they can get out front in the world, through education and a game-changing presence in the world of work for pay. Honest labor ― not corrupted subservience.

Might the corrupted subservience that men accept in their mania for football be a conspiracy wrought or abetted by women? Are mothers, for reasons of their own, encouraging sons to try football, knowing the risks of permanent injury are high, and even life-threatening, and less likely to end in a worthwhile degree than would strict devotion to the education itself? Women have now more than leveled the playing field in higher learning. While men have grown football into the leading entertainment industry, women also are leveling the competition of the workplace.

As they claim the greater share of jobs in the post-recession economy, because they are better prepared, are they turning the second century of their right to vote into the Century of Women​? I’m betting on it. With a second Super Bowl on the horizon to clarify and satisfy college dreams, male dreams, of a true national championship, women will gladly set the tables and feasts of the two biggest holy days on male calendars to please their spouses, while they go on building their momentum in the workplace. When will American men see that Big Mo is no longer on their side, gridirons aside? Not soon enough to take it back. Nor reason enough.

Ironically, the centuries of exploitation and subversion have prepared women for this challenge. And they have science on their side, whether the question is personal health or global warming. If anyone can show the world how to go on living by living simpler, women can. But men will have to  lessen their addictions to ego, power, sex, war, ignorance and superstition for it to happen. Looming as the biggest obstacle in this century is corporate power, flexed in global trade. But before the century is done, I count on women with Big Mo and science on their side to turn consumer economics  into a friend of less materialism and simpler living. I am confident they are up to it, made doable by boys always being just boys.

Frank Mensel ― September 2014