By Jerry Burke
I remember Baylee Almon, and I weep.
It usually takes a lot to make me cry. A swift kick in the no-no's, the last 10 minutes of "Field of Dreams," a quick look at my checking account. They'll all make me misty-eyed, but not quite the same way as Baylee Almon.
No, Baylee was quite a girl. Never met her myself, but I knew a lot of girls like her. Playful, lively, could be in tears one minute and laughing uncontrollably the next.
We have all known our Baylee Almons, and if they die as early as she did, we have that brief image of them we always remember. Sun on their face, hair in the wind, smiling. Kids at their first birthday party are always suspended at that brief moment between being a helpless baby and a talking mountain of sass. It's glorious.
But the image that most of us have of Baylee Almon is that of a firefighter, Chris Fields, carrying her away from danger, a day past her first birthday and wearing little white socks. Her hair isn't blowing in the wind because it's matted with blood. And although she's not quite dead yet, all Fields can do is look into her face and try to rationalize why this has happened to someone so small.
Chances are we all remember Baylee because of the resourceful eye of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Charles H. Porter IV. But what she came to represent, more than six years before Sept. 11, was the end of our country's innocence in the age of terrorism.
April 19, 1995. The Murrah Federal Building. Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight dead, including 19 children. Including Baylee.
And it didn't come from the skies, from some shadowy collection of misguided martyrs murdering in the name of their god. It came from two of our own, former Marines who believed the Constitution, specifically the Second Amendment, was under attack by a godless government.
Ten years later, what have we learned? Apparently not much. The gun shows at which Timothy McVeigh earned his money en route to murder still run unabated, open to kooks both foreign and domestic.
We still have those people so bold as to claim that they know the will of God. People who will stop at nothing to ensure that their will becomes the will of the nation. People who wish to restore the notion that divine right is a prerequisite to holding public office. And not just in Iraq, but right here in our backyard.
And in case you think I'm paranoid, this is a movement whose two biggest allies in the Senate have, respectively, admitted to bringing his 20-week-old, stillborn fetus home for a "going-away party" with his other young children (Rick Santorum, R-Homophobe) and to adopting kittens from shelters and practicing surgical procedures on them (Bill Frist, R-Catkiller).
And now Frist mulls destroying the filibuster so that a handful of previously rejected judges can be affirmed because, says Frist, "[Democrats] are blocking the rights of all members of the Senate to fulfill their constitutional duty to advise and consent."
Be wary of leaders who are firmly convinced that they are being oppressed, especially when they're busy oppressing others (gay marriage, anyone?) or conveniently forgetting that they have had control of all three branches of federal government for the past five years. And if they don't like the outcome of court cases, then it's open season on the judges they don't like. No man, no problem, right?
Wrong. We have come too far as a people to be distracted, let alone bullied, by such blind stupidity. "Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1810. "As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times."
Grow up, theocratic America. The law of man may be flawed, but it's the only law we have. And if people followed it without delusions of grandeur, Baylee Almon would turn 11 years old this week, a sixth-grader finding out that boys might not be as icky as she once thought. For that, for a world without Baylee, I weep.
