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© St. Petersburg Times, published November 12, 2002
I guess back then I was too young to know better. Or maybe my teachers at Morven Elementary School had misled me.
But back then, during the early '60s, I spelled constitution with a capital C. It was sacred. The Constitution was America. It was the core around which everything else was wrapped. It was the reason I would have opportunities my parents didn't. It was the rudder keeping the country headed in the right direction no matter what idiotic ideas might be in the head of the person at the wheel.
And there was a copy of it right there in the school library that could be checked out and taken home.
Once I got past the pure awe of having the Constitution in my hands, I read every word of it, using every spare moment I could find. I was enjoying a privilege and performing a duty. I had done the same thing a couple of years earlier with the Bible.
I didn't believe one could truly claim to embrace a set of beliefs -- America or Christianity -- without reading the document upon which the beliefs were built. Anything short of that is merely adherence based on hearsay.
After about 14 years as a Florida resident, I have yet to read the state's Constitution. After Tuesday's elections, the duty seems even less compelling. As the votes came in, I watched the C in the state's Constitution strengthen its bid for becoming lowercase as a new batch of narrow, situational, nonessential clutter was dumped into it.
Nine amendments were added. They are now state law.
The already cramped space common sense is allowed to occupy in our lives lost more square footage.
This is not to say that the ideas behind the amendments were bad. What sane person would argue that small classes are not more conducive to learning than large ones? Who would argue against every child having the opportunity to go to preschool? Who, for that matter, would argue that pregnant pigs should be kept in pens so small that they can barely move? Or that nonsmokers should not be able to eat, work and entertain themselves without breathing someone else's tobacco smoke?
The only amendment referendum that didn't pass was a change to the Miami-Dade home rule charter, and that probably had more to do with the attitude of people around the state toward Miami than with the substance of the proposed amendment.
This is to say that if someone suspects a couple of pig farmers are being cruel to their animals, then that person should lodge a complaint with local authorities and let them investigate. Animal cruelty was already prohibited without the amendment.
This is to say that if classes in your district are too large, then pressure and lobby local and state governments to build schools and hire teachers. If the place where you work or eat is unhealthy because of smoke, demand that agencies already in place to safeguard health and safety do their job. The economic impact of not patronizing unhealthy businesses is also a tool.
Don't use the Constitution as a situational remedy. Don't legislate in stone the resolution of the issue of the hour. Don't create new law when conscientious enforcement of existing ones is the answer. The Constitution should be bigger than that.
Yes, you can argue that referendum is the exercise of democracy in its purest form. Theoretically, it is. A group of citizens, driven by their passionate belief in a need, enlist the aid of like-minded citizens who sign a petition in sufficient number to demand entry on the ballot. Or the Legislature generates the idea and seeks to tap the public will by putting it on the ballot. Then on election day, the majority says yea or nay. What could be more democratic?
That's the process in theory. In reality, people with motives that are sometimes somewhere south of altruism often hire people to gather signatures on their petitions. Those canvassers are more like panhandlers than advocates for their cause: Toss them a signature and they'll leave you alone.
One such canvasser posted himself outside a driver's license bureau in St. Petersburg and pestered people on behalf of the class size petition. People going in routinely put him off by saying they would sign it on the way out, just as they do the kids selling cookies or candy at the grocery store. Just as with the kids selling candy, the canvasser probably got as many signatures from exiting people out of guilt as he did out of support for the proposal.
Getting on the ballot is the bulk of the battle, some analysts say. Once there, passage, taking advantage of voters' inclination to affirm, is practically assured if there is nothing that generates a negative reaction -- like "Miami-Dade" -- in the wording.
At the polls, voters typically don't take the time with the ballot needed to deliberate on something as weighty as a proposed amendment to the Constitution. At one polling place, a poll worker was encouraging voters to keep the pace going, complaining to people in line that voters were now taking longer than earlier ones, whose swiftness he illustrated with several rapid snaps of his fingers.
Hurry up and write your Constitution.
Nearly 40 years have elapsed since I read the U.S. Constitution with so much reverence.
With Florida's, it's becoming harder to imagine that anyone still capitalizes the C.
-- To reach Elijah Gosier, call (727) 893-8650 or e-mail gosier@sptimes.com.