In class the other evening I referred without attribution to theologian Paul Tillich's (1886-1965) idea that everyone had something about which they were 'ultimately concerned,' which is Tillich's definition of religion. While a person's religion could be his Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc., it could also be materialism, socialism, nationalism, you-name-it.
The idea is that you ought to make your ultimate concern something worthwhile, transcendant perhaps, not of base material such as the pursuit of the Almighty dollar, to use a phrase that illustrates a base ultimate concern.
There's little sense in worshipping idols with feet of clay, is there, as disillusionment and disappointment are the inevitable result.
I suppose that's why, in the world's major religions, we worship unattainable ideals of gods having attributes that are anything but feet-of-clay. Unattainable, perhaps, but no muddy feet, at least.
Tillich is known for coining the term "ultimate concern" as being THE definition of one's actual religion, which is distinct from one's nominal religion, such as Christianity, Judaism, etc.
I'd first heard of Paul Tillich while I was a student in college, Wagner College, Staten Island, N.Y.
Tillich was a German Lutheran pastor and university professor, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He fled Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 and began persecuting Jews. Tillich had protested and fallen into disfavor, and was able to come then to the United States.
Wagner College had been founded in the 1880s as a Lutheran college which trained (and still did as to some when I attended) students for the ministry. Over the years the college had become nonsectarian and open to all. Wagner was the only college located on Staten Island, where I was born and raised, when I attended. Now there are several.
Local students, Island residents of all faiths or denominations, or none, who preferred not to go away to college, lived at home with their families and commuted, as I did.
Off-Island students, who lived in the dorms, were mainly the sons and daughters of Lutheran parents hoping to see that their kids got a good education in a congenial environment, which they certainly did. One saw many German and Scandinavian last names among the dorm students.
I returned to StatNisland, as it is pronounced by the locals in the Summer of 2003 with my son Rick as we made a slow driving history trip from Boston to Washington, D.C. in celebration of his college graduation. After sighteeing in Boston, we visited my sister in Croton-on-Hudson and drove up the Hudson River to Hyde Park, a bit north of Poughkeepsie, and visited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidential library.
A day or two later we visited the World Trade Center, remains of, as the result of 9-11. My father, Leo, a crane operator, built the Trade Center. During the War, that would be WWII, he built ships in the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard on StatNisland. Construction workers never say "I helped build that." They say, "I built that." Dad built the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge, the World Trade Center, and every time we crossed New York Harbor on the ferry, he'd point to a ship and say, "See that ship? I built that ship." When I was a kid, Dad built the world as far as I was concerned. He was the kind of guy who built things. He built our garage. I mixed the concrete with a shovel and hoe. He built our first TV set, from a kit. I watched him thread wire through insulation called 'spaghetti.' You had to be careful about what you were talking about in my home when you said we were having spaghetti for dinner.
And then Rick and I visited StatNisland and Wagner College before continuing our journey to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington over the following week or more.
Wagner is located on the Grymes Hill, one of the few hills along the flat East Coast, and commands a beautiful view overlooking the Upper and Lower Bays of New York Harbor, and the Italian Bridge, as the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge is sometimes called by locals who have chosen to be ethnically polite.
Wagner has been contributing leaders to New York's business, legal, medical, engineering, chemical, academic, etc., worlds for a long time. Its campus was rated for beauty as one of the top five in the country by one of those magazine surveys that rates such things.
The Protestant Reformation, initiated by Martin Luther, took hold predominantly in the northern European countries of Germany, the Low Countries, Sweden and Norway. The Reformation met the greatest resistance in the Latin countries, France, Spain, and Italy. See the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants by Catholics in France, which, with ongoing sectarian persecution, caused thousands of French Protestants, called Huguenots, to flee to Belgium, England, the Low Countries, and to the New World, including Staten Island, where we had a community named Huguenot.
Wagner stressed "Faith in Life," devoting a week each year to a lecture program so entitled, and a required course called "Comparative Religion," which exposed all students to a survey of the history and tenets of the major world faiths. Many considered it one of the most interesting courses offered. Many, but not necessarily all of the professors in the department of philosophy and religion were Lutheran, and one tended to hear the a Protestant take on religious questions.
I recall one philosophy professor who held up for special debunking the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, "This is my body; this is my blood," holding up the bread and wine central to the Eucharist of the Christian Mass.
Was this to be taken literally, by some miracle (the so-called Transubstantiation Doctrine favored by Catholics), or figuratively (Jesus resorting to metaphor, favored by Protestants)? The professor was Protestant.
Martin Luther was a German Augustinian Catholic monk who sparked what became the Protestant Reformation by nailing his 95 theses to the local cathedral door. Across the way from Wagner College was a Catholic seminary called the Augustinian Academy, whose wooden door annually suffered nail holes as some Wagner (theology or beer-ridden) students nailed their own theses to it in emulation of their theological hero. We had a dean, Adolf Stern, the head of the chemistry department, who advocated that beer was more healthful than milk, a precept that Wagner students, on his authority, accepted with alacrity at the local Hofbrau and Buddy-Buddy clubs.
Our Con-Law class reference to Paul Tillich's "ultimate concern" prompted me to perform a Google search on his last name and that term, which produced a number of references, as one would expect of a one of America's leading theologians, as Tillich is regarded.
This Tillich quote is worth noting:
"Protestantism is a continuous history of the breaking of images."
The "breaking of images" has a long history in general. When U.S. troops fought their way into Baghdad recently to depose the ruthless, blood-thirsty, tyrant Saddam Hussein, we watched with rapt attention and cheered as his statues were pulled to the ground, symbolizing the rejection and destruction of the man who presented himself to his people as a god. Saddam's ultimate concern was to remain in power. That was his real religion, far more important to him than his professed religion, Islam, which he used as a cover for his crimes, not a submission to God, which is what the word 'Islam' means. One submits to God by bowing down and praying on one's knees.
When the Protestant Reformation came to England during the time of Henry VIII, it met favor with many English whose religious sensibilities held that their Christian, heretofore Catholic Church, under the authority of the Pope in Rome, had become far too rich and fancy for their taste. They felt it abusive and in need of reform for many reasons, which they set about to do.
So many landowners had bequeathed property to the Church over the generations that the monasteries had become the largest landowners in the kingdom, landowners who did not pay taxes to the Crown, either. Henry VIII appropriated all of the monasteries to the Crown and then sold them off in the biggest land sale prior to the Louisiana Purchase. See the article here on the Measuring of America, a direct offshoot of the sale of the monasteries. Once you were able easily to survey land, it could be sold in small parcels and used to create wealth. It became 'property' as used in the Constitution, and its owners became politically powerful as a class. Only property owners could vote in the early days of this country.
Henry VIII broke with Rome over the controversy having to do with his dynastic need to divorce the childless Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn, with whom he hoped to insure the succession of the Crown to his line. He established the Church of England, also called the Anglican Church there and the Episcopal Church in America, today. See the Faulkner quote, above, about the past not being dead, it's not even past...
This sparked an open season on Catholic church ritual, images, statuary, stained glass windows, vestments, position of priest at altar, abandonment of Latin as the language of the mass, church ornament, adornment, music, singing, hymns, and other trappings and practices. Essentially the old forms were abandoned or destroyed in favor of a simpler, purer practice.
This is what Tillich means in saying that the history of Protestantism is the history of the "breaking of images."
The more traditional word for the breaking of images is "iconoclasm" from, I understand, the Greek 'ikon' for depiction such as painting or statue, and 'clasm', to break. That's what a clash is, I surmise. We say that a person is iconoclastic when he expresses a willingness to challenge established norms and forms. Artists and political radicals are iconoclasts by definition. No iconoclasts, no progress.
The old ways can carry you only so far.
Protestantism, the protest against the abuses of a long-entrenched church headquartered elsewhere, at Rome, under a foreign potentate called a pope, is the story of breaking down the previously established structure, all that it represented, and all that represented it, apart from a pure and simple belief in God.
The Amish, a Christian sect of German descent that settled in Pennsylvania, originally, and the late Shakers of upstate New York and New England, are known for their simple life. The Amish use horses and buggies instead of motorized trucks and cars. Shaker furniture is known for its clean, functional lines, with no added embellishment. "Tis a gift to be simple" is a famous, and simple, Shaker hymn.
During Henry VIII's time, then, the English Protestants drove out in large part the Catholic Church in England. Clergymen either adopted the Church of England as theirs or, alternatively stuck with Rome and were forced into hiding or fled, as their churches were destroyed of 'Popish" trapping and rite by the new Protestants. Protestant England required clergy and government appointees to swear an oath against Catholocism. This is the origin of our constitutional provision, in Article VI prohibiting the requirement of a religious test for holding any public office or trust under the United States.
However, these Protestants did not go far enough to suit many of their brethren. Controversy soon broke out over whether the new Church of England had been sufficiently purified of Catholic practice in all respects.
Those who felt that matters had gone far enough called those who sought greater purity, "Puritans," a pejorative label, perhaps first applied during the reign of Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth I.
The major problem of her reign was to put down Catholic plots against her life without destroying too many loyal closet Catholics among the leading families. She needed to promote enough Protestantism to satisfy the more moderate adherents without giving in to those damned nuisance Puritans, as they were often regarded, for carrying a point too far.
Guess who founded our country!
This country was founded by this ball-breaking, make that image-breaking, group whom we call the Puritans, in Massachusetts and New England in the north.
"They" is "us."
To this day.
How did Tillich's "ultimate concern" find its way into a discussion of U.S. Constitutional Law?
The great issue in the presidential election between Pres. George W. Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry was over whose "morality" would control the future of the country.
Bush's Religious Right, opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and in favor of school prayer and keeping the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance recited by public school children everywhere to this day (voluntarily, of course), was opposed to Kerry's more "liberal" view that another's religion should not be forced down the throat of an unwilling population.
This would include preservation of a woman's constitutional right to choose to abort her fetus, or put in a more elevated way, to bear or beget children, to use the language of Eisenstadt v. Baird.
These issues are matters of ultimate concern to their proponents on each side. This makes such issues a matter of religion in Tillich's terms, as well as ordinary terms.
The Religious Right consists of conservative Christians of more than just one sect. It also includes other social conservative, encompassing some Jews and others.
Do you feel it proper, do you want, people of another faith practicing their religion through government, thus forcing their views and practices on you, if you happen not to adhere to their religious views?
Of course not.
But in a democracy, do we not have majority rule?
You would not wish to live in a pure, unmediated democracy.
You would be at the mercy of your neighbors, acting through their majority political power to enact their views into law and forcing them on you by armed policemen.
You want protection from the so-called "tyranny of the majority."
The majority does NOT rule in this country.
To prevent the majority from tyrannizing us, as Saddam did to his people, we have agreed to a mechanism to prevent us from becoming victim to the majority.
This mechanism is the Constitution, interposed between the people and government, as a protection against passing emotion, such as the panic resulting from Pearl Harbor and 9-11 that resulted in the detention without legal process of many people of Japanese ancestry and at Guantanamo.
Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky suggests that the apt metaphor is provided by Homer in the Odyssey, where Ulysses (or Odysseus) on the adventur-filled journey on the Wine-Dark Sea, back from Troy to Ithaca, orders his sailors to plug their ears with wax and bind him to the mast when about to hear the Siren's song that would lead to a fatal encounter if succumbed to. Ulysses would hear the song but be powerless to order his men to beach and thus wreck the ship. By requiring Super-majorities to amend the Constitution, we have bound ourselves to the mast of the Ship of State.
A friend argued that we not only had, in this country, majority rule, but that the Constitution was set up by majority. A majority, he said, could change the Constitution. The majority ruled.
I felt obliged to point out, in disagreement, that the majority does not always control this country, because it takes a Super-majority to amend the Constitution either by the Congressional amendment process (requiring agreement of 2/3 of both Houses) or the State convention method (2/3 of all states) as provided in Article VI.
But the Constitution was adopted by majority rule, he argued.
Again I disagreed. When the thirteen original states assembled in convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation, with 55 representatives participating, they decided to draft an entirely new Constitution, in secret, because they were only supposed to be revising, not creating a whole new government. That would be viewed as threatening the states which sent them as delegates.
The thirteen states provided, in Article VII of the new Constitution, that it would not, and could not, be adopted unless and until NINE of the thirteen states ratified it in direct popular constitutional referendums (not by the legislatures) of each state.
And then only the ratifying states would be bound. The others would go their own way. Eventually all thirteen ratified.
Adoption of the Constitution to form and bind the nation was thus unanimous, not by a mere majority. Counting by state, majority rule had not applied. Unanimity had been required to get started as a nation.
Why did we deliberately, in Article VI, make it so difficult to amend the Constitution?
Because we don't trust ourselves, or more to the point, each other. That much we know.
We know very well how thoughtlessly passionate we become when panicked, paranoid, excessively afraid, hysterical or any other state of heightened emotion that people are capable of becoming, such as after Pearl Harbor or 9-11.
We're apt to do anything, including rounding up people and throwing them in concentration camps, all legal like, of course, with the blessing of the highest court and government officials in the land. And we'll do it again.
We just did. What do you think the detentions of the prisoners at Guantanamo was all about. Deprival of individual rights in the name of collective security.
"Those who are willing to sacrifice liberty in return for security deserve neither liberty nor security."
That, as near as I can recall, is a quote from Benjamin Franklin.
We get the government we deserve, which is no doubt why many of us feel we're in trouble right now.
The question is whether we have lost our way, abandoned our better values.
* * *
We have a choice as to what kind of country we'd like to live in, or more to the point leave to our children and their children for them to live in.
We have two choices, broadly speaking. Let's put them on opposites of a spectrum, a wide array of choices. This is often a good technique for seeing where we stand on matter. The political spectrum extends from left to right, liberal to conservative, by common convention.
One end of the spectrum, is the choice of opting for a theocracy. We're familiar with theocracies in our own time, as in Taliban controlled Afghanistan before the American invasion and overthrow there following 9-11. Women there were forced to wear the burqa, the long gown that covered crown to toe, with netting to peer through.
Or the komitehs in Iran, which whipped women and men for breaches of the disciplinary code of dress and manners.
And the religious police of Saudi Arabia, who force women to cover their hair and form with scarves and long gowns. In the name of Islam.
Or the minister led towns of Puritan New England in the beginning, where taxes of corn and firewood went to support the minister.
There's little doubt that early New Englanders viewed themselves and their government as Christian, far more theocratic than secular in character. We have a similar choice as in which direction to lean.
Today however, a lot of water has gone over the dam and not all of us see the United States as a Christian country if it ever really was, or we, meaning the founding generation, ever really did.
The Puritans arrived in 1620 in Plymouth but the U.S.A. was not established until, at the earliest, 1776, under the Articles of Confederation, or 1789 under the Constitution, because it took until then to ratify and set up. Washington and the first Congress and Supreme Court were established in New York City (lower Manhattan at Wall Street) in 1789. We had 169 years of practice before going into business for ourselves.
Not all of the colonies were established as religious refuges, as was Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania (Quaker, under William Penn). Others were strictly commercial investment ventures, such as Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. German Protestant and Scotch-Irish Protestant immigrants arrived in large number. Irish Catholic and some Jewish immigrants arrived. Dutch Reformed lived in New York before the British took over Niew Amsterdam and renamed the colony and its leading city. I doubt that there was any religious unity. Rhode Island represented a splitting off of Puritan from Puritan to form the origins of the Baptist Church, perhaps the largest denomination in the U.S. today.
Slowly the nation's religious past faded somewhat into the background, but not entirely, aided by the belief, embodied in the Constitution, in the First Amendment, that there should be, in Jefferson's phrase, "a wall of separation between Church and State."
The alternative to theocracy is a secular state that provides a shell under which all faiths may practice to their heart's content provided that they do not try to take over the state or impose their views on members of other faiths or of no faith.
Some true-believers, evangelicals, they call themselves, believe they have a God-given duty to preach what they believe is the truth, to "save" the rest of us from hell and damnation. See the item on Jonathan Edwards, last of the Puritans, in the right margin here, and his famous sermon, "Sinners in the hands of an Angry God," or the like.
This battle between fundamentalist Christian political forces and the rest of the nation was played out in the last presidential election of a week ago. It continues to be played out in regards to whether Sen. Arlen Specter will be named Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which conducts hearings on the qualifications of federal judges in general and Supreme Court justices in particular. With an elderly Court and an ailing Chief Justice, one can expect vacancies to occur on the Court during the next four-year Presidentiad. Spector's views on the inviolability of a woman's constitutional right to choose to have an abortion is anathema to the social conservatives who view him as a heretic, ready for burning at the stake, figuratively, at least. Fire Department regulations in the District of Columbia seem to be the only impediment between Spector and the real thing.
In sum, we have a tug-of-war over which vision of the country will prevail, theocracy or secular state.
The religionists regard the secular state as a Godless state. They put "under God" into the Pledge to contrast us from the Godless Communists in 1954 when the Cold War was in its infancy and McCarthyism had infected the land. This is what Michael Newdow continues to battle.
Fifty years have now elapsed since 'under God' was implanted by statute in the Pledge.
Communism is on the wane. The Soviet Union with its nuclear capability to destroy us is no more.
And so we have a choice: God or Country, but not both together.
How do you see it?
Which would you prefer?
How much of what you prefer should be constitutionalized, that is, put into constitutional law?
How high is the wall, that imaginary wall, between church and state?
What of contraception? Abortion? Physician assisted suicide? Stem-cell research?
Do we have the right to decide for ourselves whether to use contraception? Abort a fetus? Become an unwilling parent? Assume the responsibility of raising this soon-to-be-child now?
Do we have the right to control the end of our own life? By asking a physician for assistance? Or will the physician be prosecuted criminally or lose his, or her, medical license for helping the patient in extremis? Is this murder or a right to die-with-dignity? Do we decide? God? Government?
Jesus said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's. But what is Caesar's? And what is God's? And what is ours to decide, to control? These are Constitutional Law questions being played out as we speak. This is why you study Constitutional Law, to acquaint you with the legal considerations that go into these otherwise moral, ethical, religious, and political questions of life and death, literally.
You are studying all this in order to provide yourself with the information needed to formulate, or reinforce, your own positions on them, on behalf of you, your client, your country, and perhaps your God.
That sounds like a pretty tall order, doesn't it? Welcome!
Are we free or under government control? How much government control?
Do we have this liberty, or may government, the neighbors, essentially, control our lives, the important decisions in our lives?
Do we have the right to tell the neighbors, and government, to Mind Your Own Business? I call this the MYOB Doctrine (sometimes MYOFB), and lay claim to formulating it in so many words, since it encapsulates the idea and evokes the emotion of Liberty aka Freedom. Brandeis has claim to "privacy;" while I've got MYOB. We should both be happy.
MYOB, I suggest is the rationale that explains Griswold, Moore v. E. Cleveland, Roe, and Lawrence. It is what we mean when we claim that government has no business inspecting bedrooms for signs of sexual activity that the neighbors happen not to like, or even a majority of them.
A classmate of ours has a son who is also studying Constitutional Law at another fine law school, McGeorge in Sacramento, a part of the University of the Pacific headquartered in Stockton. The son took a summer Con-Law course given by by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Kennedy is reported via third-hand hearsay to have said that in his estimation the most important case ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court is Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
Why would a case about contraception be considered so important by such an influential authority as Justice Kennedy?
Maybe Griswold wasn't about contraception, except in the sense that an argument over contraception provided the context for inventing a vehicle for carrying liberty far into the future, as on a Saturn V rocket.
The student comment surprised me because I'd never heard it said that Griswold was the most important Con-Law case of all.
How could that be, I wondered, and put it to the class. We would try to see whether we agreed. In fact we didn't quite reach the question last evening, but we may come back to it later.
I would have thought that Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the 1954 public school integration case would have been deemed by some, at least, to be the most important decision. By finally holding that equal protection of law means what it says, Brown freed two races, not just one, from the pernicious effects, or tried to at least, of long-standing racism, the belief in alleged white supremacy.
Blacks were victimized by pervasive discrimination taught by the example of segregated public, government mandated and sponsored schools, while whites were imprisoned by their own prejudices.
Brown freed both races.
It sought to free one but freed another as well.
Not perfectly perhaps, in the real world on the ground, but a good start after a bad history.
Three centuries of racism weren't going to be undone at a pen stroke, or nine pen strokes, I suppose.
2004 is the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board, and earlier this year the decision was commemorated with numerous books and articles commenting on its effect. While Brown may not have lived fully up to its promise of racial integration, given the segregation of society racially that persists, I was interested to see Vernon Jordan state in an interview that he regarded Brown as the most important Supreme Court decision in his lifetime.
Griswold's claim to fame would rest on the following:
It was the first case that held unconstitutional on non-textual grounds, a statute, after the Court said it would no longer Lochnerize, that is to strike legislation on the grounds of the belief of the justices that it was wrong or unwise, since the 1936 decision in Parrish v. West Coast Hotel, which overruled Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923).
In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court declared unconstitutional a Connecticut statute that criminalized the providing of contraceptive advice by a physician to a married couple.
Justice Douglas claimed to have found a right of "privacy" based on the "penumbras and emanations" (shadows and radiations) of the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 9th Amendments of the Bill of Rights. Freedom of Association (1st), Freedom from the Quartering of Soldiers in your home (3rd), Right Against Self-Incrimination (5th) all created a "zone of privacy" into which government could not rightly intrude. Douglas also cited the 9th Amendment which provides:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Douglas also had the benefit of two substantive due process cases from the Lochner era, Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. The Society of Sisters from roughly 1923 and 1925. These were the cases in which, respectively, the Court held that parents had the right to send their children to German language school and Catholic school. These cases thus became authority for the right of parents to decide on the upbringing, education, religion, language, and culture of their children. Government, in short, had to butt out. The neighbors had to butt out.
The neighbors and government are the same thing, in reality.
How many of you would like your neighbors to stick their noses into your family business such as how you rear your kids, or whether you should even have children?
This is what Constitutional Law is all about. Who decides, you or the neighbors, meaning government.
From Griswold's right to privacy, or the right to be let alone by government, which I say is the individual's right to tell government to MYOB, comes Roe v. Wade (1973), in direct succession, and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), authored by none other than Justice Kennedy who reportedly thinks Griswold is so important. Kennedy based Lawrence on individual liberty, just as Griswold is based on liberty. Justices Douglas and Kennedy have both struck strong blows for liberty, and that's monumental.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, however, preferred to ground her concurrence in Lawrence on Equal Protection, not Liberty.
No less good, but if you have true Liberty, you don't need to fall back on the safety net of Equal Protection, do you?
Justice Kennedy reveals himself to be a true believer in individual liberty. "Scratch a conservative and find a libertarian!" as Dean Joseph P. Russoniello aptly observes.
Griswold opens the door to the recognition of a host of unenumerated rights not expressly listed in the Constitution, rights that belong to the people because we have for so long taken them for granted, like eating food and breathing air.
That's pretty important, don't you think?
Griswold breathes the Life of Liberty into the 9th Amendment, Kennedy's 'Ode to Joy,' as it were.
Douglas's Ninth competes favorably with Beethoven's.
When Grandma Moore decided to take in her grandbaby, the son of her deceased daughter, in violation of East Cleveland's housing density ordinance, the Court found that she had a right to tell government to MYOB when it came to telling her whom she might include in the definition of her family. That was her liberty, not government's right, to decide who was her 'blood' and who wasn't, based on Griswold, among others.
That's why Griswold is important. It allows the Court to recognize unrecognized rights.
Viewed in this light, one can see why Griswold may be one of our most important cases in competition with Brown.
Can you think of any other case you would put on this plane?
Which?
Why?
This sounds like a good reason to schedule another Walk'n'Talk along San Francisco Bay, doesn't it?
Maybe next Saturday morning.
See you in class, Thursday, Nov. 18th, the last of the semester and didn't that fly by?