Ode to Antonin

You are not even in the ground yet and they come.  They come with their disdain, their praise, their vitriol and idolatry, their mocking and memorializing.

You oh great proponent of originalism, the idea that our Constitution is frozen in time and hallowed, to be viewed not as a living, breathing document, but one that is dead, cemented with principles of the past, exactly as it was written. 

And while I can understand the allure of such adherence, a clutching onto the solace that comes with certainty in this otherwise uncertain world, I could never concur.  For you see at the time “We the People” was constructed, I was excluded from the very definition of the “people.”  My blackness and my womanhood denied me the ability to be fully vested in those assigned rights. 

And so I do not accept the idea of a dead document.  See, we live in a world never envisioned or imagined. Those men who developed those past notions, revolutionary though they may have been in their moment, cannot continue to govern me from their graves, nor can you from yours.

I will never allow them or you to grip me from that bygone era, but that way of being does not mean that I am not sad over your passing.   I am perplexed by the strange circumstances that now surround you; this peculiar war that is waging on around you before you are even buried and fully mourned.  While I have never seen eye to eye with you, I have always seen you as my colleague, my equal, my foe to be sure, but a worthy opponent. 

You were the dark to my light, the down to my up, the out to my in and through your hard and fixed gaze on originalism, I learned to set my sights on the flexibility that seems necessary to adjust to our constantly evolving realities.  And through your strict adherence to the models of the old, I learned to flow into the stretch, the growth and even the pains that come with embracing the new.  And so I see no reason for hatred here, just gratitude for the formation that only comes after being forged in the fires of deep dissent. 

Until we meet again, dear Antonin.  Until we meet again.