Your editorial from Sunday, June 17th ("Debate, votes are part of democracy") demonstrated a fundamental and dangerous misunderstanding of our Constitution. You wrote, "rights are codified in constitutions and their amendments, all of which are voted into existence by the people or their elected representatives". The Constitution does not codify any rights -- the rights we enjoy are inalienable and implied to exist unless explicitly denied by the government.
Even though our system of government is a representative democracy, the founders understood that it is the people who hold the power. Only we, the people, can grant the government the power to restrict our inherent rights. The first amendment, for instance, does not state, "The people have a right to free speech, religion, and free press." It says that congress shall not infringe on the rights to free speech, religion, and free press. The Bill of Rights does not and was never intended to enumerate all of our rights; it merely reinforces the concept that the government does not have the power to prohibit certain rights. The founders created a Constitution that went to great lengths to restrict governmental power in order to prevent the state from infringing on our inalienable rights. Your editorial implies the reverse -- that the government holds all power and determines which rights its citizens exercise.
The rights we enjoy came from no one, certainly not from votes. They are human rights. We live in a country that mostly respects those rights because our ancestors fought a monarch and believed that government should not be more powerful than the people. And laws that reinforced our rights (such as the Civil Rights Act) were simply rebukes of previous legislatures who tried to infringe on those rights, unconstitutionally.
Citizens, through our elected representatives, may enact laws that further restrict our rights. The claim that supporters of a gay marriage amendment sought to "clarify" the Massachusetts Constitution obscures the fact that the amendment's "clarification" would have had the effect of restricting the activities and rights of one class of people. Although citizens have the power to amend the Constitutions (both Massachusetts' and United States') in ways that encroach on our rights (see the 18th Amendment), we should never be flippant about such initiatives or impatient about the process. Indeed, we should fight against such initiatives.
By voting down the proposed initiative, a majority of the state's legislators agree that an amendment which seeks to discriminate against a class of people deserves no place in Massachusetts' Constitution.
This morning while standing in the shower, I observed a stream of water running down my forehead, dripping beads from my eyelashes. I felt each drop ramp off my lash and fall in front of my eye, bounce against my chest and find its way to the drain. The flow formed drops with a regular frequency; I tilted my head to quicken the drips, turning it into a tributary before me. I focused on the sound of running water while staring at the shower head.
I wandered around the mall for an hour and a half specifically to photograph the spectacle of "black friday", only to leave the building without a single photo. Fully aware of the legal grey-area that is mall photography, I didn't want to shoot indiscriminately. I spent some time looking for visuals that would describe the shopping phenomenon and silently condemn such crass consumerism. Surely I'd be able to find an example at the Cambridgeside Galleria.
But then something hit me. Most of the people I saw seemed to be ordinary, "middle class" Americans. They weren't flaunting their wealth or relishing in materialism. They looked like victims, shuffling from store to store, floating along in life with the inertia of a society bred to consume. I wondered if people understood why they felt compelled to shop today. If the only reason to buy something today is that it's a little bit cheaper, maybe you didn't need the thing in the first place. Or if shopping for a gift, what message does it send to the recipient? "I bought this thing for you because it was on sale." Hmm.
Instead of cynicism, I felt shame. How could I photograph unknowing victims of a well-funded brainwashing campaign as if they were to blame? We're a nation of cattle, but with one significant difference: free will. It doesn't take much prodding to realize the futility and meaninglessness of an unfettered lust for more "stuff". A cow can't just march off the farm and decide not to be slaughtered, but people can renounce artificiality and materialism.
At any rate, I didn't know how to represent the contradiction and the dynamic going on in this mall. Should I show a mass of people shopping? What does that image mean without the context I'm talking about — especially since the mass is made of individuals who each have a story, with motivations and intentions. I was stuck.
A guy close to my age approached me and asked about what I was doing. Then he revealed that he was working for an advertising company trying to sell a salon package to shoppers; unfortunately, his company didn't have a permit to be in the mall, so the three people working had to be very sly in their dealings. We talked about this and that, and I think he briefly tried to sell me the salon thing (I'm teflon to advertising...). But as we were talking I thought that he'd be an interesting example of this whole mess I'd been thinking of -- here was a working class guy, a self-proclaimed punk, from Worcester working for an advertising company from Ontario, trying to sell stuff (without permission) to wealthy people shopping in Cambridge. It's like the barnacle that grows on the whale.
But just as I was about to take his portrait, a sharply-dressed mall stooge told me that I can't take pictures in the mall. He was polite about it, and I didn't ask why or protest because I know about the court cases, and private property, and yadda yadda.
So, that was it. I walked home with a lot on my mind and no answers.