Yet here we are—considering taking that leap into an abyss that all rational calculations indicate may well have no bottom.  At age 44, my wife and I are about equally distant from the halcyon days of college and the Elysian fields of retirement, and common sense says that we should spend the next 20 years consolidating and slowing growing our meager nest egg, not taking on a 30-year mortgage when we have only ten or so years left on our current one.

We would be leaving behind not only some portion of our economic security but a solid two-and-a-half story house that we’ve constantly improved and that’s filled with the memories of nine years.  Every one of our children has spent at least half of his life there, and the last four have known no other.  They have wreaked destruction on the walls and floors and even ceilings, and, as they have grown older, they have put their own sweat and elbow grease into sanding and painting and plumbing.  Someday, they may even look back on that work as time well spent, when they’re ordering their own children to find a monkey wrench or wash out a paint roller.

Our oldest will leave for college in 15 months or so, and, over the next several years, the house would slowly become a little more quiet and a little bit bigger, after years of growing more, shall we say, cozy.  So why would we even consider leaving it now for a massive Victorian of indeterminate vintage, a gloriously rambling mess of rooms with uneven floors and walls of cracking plaster covered with vintage wallpaper, old enough to have been built without an indoor kitchen, which was added on some years later without the best (or perhaps any) consideration for properly integrating it into the rest of the house?

On the market almost continuously for the past four years, the house has now reverted to Fannie Mae, and there’s a possibility that we could get it for a song.  More cautious souls have looked carefully at years of “deferred maintenance” and a first-year property-tax bill eerily close to my take-home pay in 1996 and wisely moved on.  But the trouble with people who recognize that economics isn’t everything is that they sometimes can become convinced that it isn’t anything.  That gaping abyss is surely spanned by a crystal bridge just a few feet down.  Use your imagination.

The chance to purchase this house is more than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  It is the kind of home that could become the center of a family for several generations.  As rooms open up when children leave, they could be filled with grandchildren who come to spend the summer with their grandparents and younger aunts and uncles.  There would be no need to wonder about where the extended family will gather for Christmas and Easter, and milestone anniversaries and birthdays.  A home like this would belong not just to my wife and myself but to our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

And there’s the rub, because while I can imagine decades or more of a home that takes on a life of its own, animated by a family that stays close and increases, my imagination is not merely sentimental.  For this home to become all that it could be requires certain things of the coming generations to which I’m not sure they will be able to commit.

At 17, our eldest daughter is as ready to leave Rockford as I was to leave Spring Lake at her age.  I see enough of her mother and me in her not to worry when she talks of big [...]]]> Purchasing a house in a city with double-digit unemployment and some of the highest property taxes in the country may well be a definition of insanity.  Buying such a house on foreclosure, unable to make the purchase contingent on the sale of your current home, undoubtedly is.

Yet here we are—considering taking that leap into an abyss that all rational calculations indicate may well have no bottom.  At age 44, my wife and I are about equally distant from the halcyon days of college and the Elysian fields of retirement, and common sense says that we should spend the next 20 years consolidating and slowing growing our meager nest egg, not taking on a 30-year mortgage when we have only ten or so years left on our current one.

We would be leaving behind not only some portion of our economic security but a solid two-and-a-half story house that we’ve constantly improved and that’s filled with the memories of nine years.  Every one of our children has spent at least half of his life there, and the last four have known no other.  They have wreaked destruction on the walls and floors and even ceilings, and, as they have grown older, they have put their own sweat and elbow grease into sanding and painting and plumbing.  Someday, they may even look back on that work as time well spent, when they’re ordering their own children to find a monkey wrench or wash out a paint roller.

Our oldest will leave for college in 15 months or so, and, over the next several years, the house would slowly become a little more quiet and a little bit bigger, after years of growing more, shall we say, cozy.  So why would we even consider leaving it now for a massive Victorian of indeterminate vintage, a gloriously rambling mess of rooms with uneven floors and walls of cracking plaster covered with vintage wallpaper, old enough to have been built without an indoor kitchen, which was added on some years later without the best (or perhaps any) consideration for properly integrating it into the rest of the house?

On the market almost continuously for the past four years, the house has now reverted to Fannie Mae, and there’s a possibility that we could get it for a song.  More cautious souls have looked carefully at years of “deferred maintenance” and a first-year property-tax bill eerily close to my take-home pay in 1996 and wisely moved on.  But the trouble with people who recognize that economics isn’t everything is that they sometimes can become convinced that it isn’t anything.  That gaping abyss is surely spanned by a crystal bridge just a few feet down.  Use your imagination.

The chance to purchase this house is more than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  It is the kind of home that could become the center of a family for several generations.  As rooms open up when children leave, they could be filled with grandchildren who come to spend the summer with their grandparents and younger aunts and uncles.  There would be no need to wonder about where the extended family will gather for Christmas and Easter, and milestone anniversaries and birthdays.  A home like this would belong not just to my wife and myself but to our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

And there’s the rub, because while I can imagine decades or more of a home that takes on a life of its own, animated by a family that stays close and increases, my imagination is not merely sentimental.  For this home to become all that it could be requires certain things of the coming generations to which I’m not sure they will be able to commit.

At 17, our eldest daughter is as ready to leave Rockford as I was to leave Spring Lake at her age.  I see enough of her mother and me in her not to worry when she talks of big cities and opportunities not found here.  I know that someday she will long for her hometown as I still do for mine, though I departed it half a lifetime ago.

No, I’m not worried about my children wanting to be anywhere but here; but I am worried that we now live in a world that may force them, as it forced me, to leave their hometown behind forever.  A house like this was not made for the occasional weekend visit, or the 36-hour Thanksgiving.  It is the kind of house that my paternal grandparents’ house was: a house for Sunday dinners and summer fun (and toil) in the yard; for snowball fights and wrestling with cousins, and passing on family stories and folk wisdom from generation to generation; a place to celebrate weddings and births, and to mourn the now-empty chair.  It is a place for conversation and for the all-too-often neglected moments of silence, when words seem less necessary than just being in the presence of people you love and of people who love you.

It is, in other words, a place to be, not a place to visit; a place to live, not a place to leave.  And it deserves a family that can treat it that way.

Could our family be that family?  Could any family be, in a world like ours?

I don’t know.  Yet I keep looking for that crystal bridge.

This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Mr. Oliver writes that Roberts' opinion is "very narrow," but the implications of the opinion are not. And it's hardly a defense of Roberts to say that "he saw the writing on the wall that some form of universal health care is inevitable" and ruled as he did to avoid "damag[ing] the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, his Supreme Court in particular." Notice what's missing? Any concern for the constitutionality of the law itself.

Mr. Oliver is convinced that Chief Justice Roberts will do the right thing on "gay marriage"; Tom Piatak has already explained why that is by no means certain. But let's take it a step further: If Roberts ruled as he did yesterday because he "saw the writing on the wall" and wanted to preserve the "legitimacy" of "his Supreme Court," why does Mr. Oliver think that such concerns won't apply in the case of "gay marriage"?

A footnote: Mr. Oliver sees "gay marriage" coming before the Court in a case involving the Equal Protection Clause, but the first cases filed in federal court, and thus the first cases likely to come to the Court, invoked the Full Faith and Credit Clause. That's why I have argued—as far back as 2004—that there is a strong possibility that the Court will rule in favor of "gay marriage," and that, if it does, it won't be surprising to see at least one "conservative" justice join in the majority. If I had to predict which one, I'd choose the man who today was quoted as saying that he hopes that "his Supreme Court" will be remembered for doing "our job according to the Constitution, of protecting equal justice under the law."

Roberts portrays his decision as a check on federal power—if the Court had upheld the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, it "would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority." But it's unclear whom he thinks he is fooling.

Silly me. I should have known the answer: He thought he'd fool the entire conservative movement. And it looks like he's right. Pretty much every mainstream conservative group or publication has offered a variation of this post at The Weekly Standard's website:

[T]he Roberts Court put real limits on what the government can and cannot do. For starters, it restricted the limits of the Commerce Clause, which does not give the government the power to create activity for the purpose of regulating it. This is a huge victory for those of us who believe that the Constitution is a document which offers a limited grant of power.

The author ignores the fact that "the Roberts Court" (that is, Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) also expanded the power of Congress to "lay and collect Taxes" beyond anything ever claimed before. Rather than noting that Congress can now force any American citizen to purchase something he does not desire or need simply by levying a a tax on him if he does not,
he even tries to make lemonade out of Roberts' declaration that the penalty imposed by Congress for failure to purchase health insurance is "legally a tax":

Republicans can and will declare that Obama has slapped the single biggest tax on the middle class in history, after promising not to do that.

Who cares that Congress has just been granted total power over how you choose to spend your money—at least Mitt and the rest of the Republicans can start cranking out those campaign ads!

Those who want to provide cover for Chief Justice Roberts or for the Republican presidential candidate who has promised to "nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts" will undoubtedly keep referring to the supposed limitation of the Commerce Clause. But that's a lot like applauding a murderer for not stabbing his victim with a knife because he blew him away with a cannon.

In the far-reaching implications of the ObamaCare ruling, however, John Roberts has revealed that he is no Sandra Day O'Connor but a latter-day Earl Warren. Today's decision not only upheld ObamaCare but provided the framework for an unprecedented expansion of federal power. If you've liked the Court's Commerce Clause decisions over the decades, you're going to love what the Court can do with Congress's power "to lay and collect Taxes."

The Syllabus of the decision provided by the Court cuts through the turgid text of Roberts' 59-page decision and tells us all we need to know: The individual mandate of ObamaCare could not be justified under the Commerce Clause, because the Commerce Clause can only regulate existing commercial activity, not compel individuals "to become active in commerce." But Congress and the President want to do precisely that, by forcing individuals without health insurance to purchase it, and so Justice Roberts (with a little help from the Obama administration's lawyers) found the justification elsewhere: Congress can levy a tax on those who refuse to purchase health insurance.

Roberts portrays his decision as a check on federal power—if the Court had upheld the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, it "would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority." But it's unclear whom he thinks he is fooling. The administration's lawyers and Roberts turned to the power "to lay and collect Taxes" precisely because the Commerce Clause had already been stretched to the limit. With today's ruling, Congress has been given the green light to do something that even the most imaginative interpretation of the Commerce Clause would not allow: to compel the supposedly free citizens of the United States to purchase anything that Congress deems in those citizens' best interest—or to compel them to purchase one thing rather than another. All Congress has to do is to pass legislation levying a tax on those who, say, fail to purchase smoke detectors for their homes, or who insist on purchasing a car that runs on gasoline over one that runs on electricity.

On second thought, comparing Roberts to Earl Warren may be unfair—to Earl Warren, that is. Warren could only dream of writing decisions that would give the federal government this kind of power over the everyday lives of American citizens. Roberts has turned that dream into a reality—and into a nightmare for anyone outside of the ruling elite in Washington, D.C.

To those today who still remember his name, Ray Bradbury was, as the New York Times declared in a lackluster obituary, "a master of science fiction whose imaginative and lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America." But while Bradbury worked in a variety of genres—horror, fantasy, and crime stories among them, as well as science fiction—what bound all of his writing together, as his friend Russell Kirk well understood, was the moral imagination. The best elements of his most famous work, The Martian Chronicles, had nothing to do with the future and technology, and everything to do with memory—imagination operating historically. (Bradbury insisted that The Martian Chronicles was not science fiction but fantasy, something that "couldn't happen," while Fahrenheit 451 was science fiction because it could—and, indeed, he believed it had happened, before 1960.)

Bradbury's moral imagination was born, as was Kirk's, in a particular time and a particular place. For almost 70 years, his imagination ran free in the hot Midwestern summer of 1934. Like meter in poetry, the constraints of his past allowed Bradbury to transcend the increasingly chaotic and immoral present.

The Waukegan, Illinois, of 1934 is gone, never to return; yet all is not lost. There are many forces competing for the imagination of a new generation, and most of them look like Mr. Dark. But there was a reason Ray Bradbury had Charles Halloway work in a library, and if you don't know what I am talking about, you need to get a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes and read it to your children, before it is too late.

Few technologies (and I'm using that term loosely here, because I think that social media doesn't really deserve that title) are wholly evil, though I am willing to stipulate that, on a continuum from fire, the lever, and the wheel (the relatively good) to nuclear energy (the relatively evil), the entire computer revolution sits very close to the latter. But, as you've suggested, Tom, we have to use the tools we have if we wish "to survive in an increasingly inhuman world." The Amish option is not an option.

I'm well aware of the world we have lost. My little village, in the 1970's and early 1980's, was easily 25 to 30 years behind the times. Little divorce, no crime, solid schools, many families living in the same area for multiple generations, neighbors on porches, concerts on summer evenings, local sporting events that were true community activities . . . I was blessed to have a childhood that my children never could.

"For the most part, the world is gone." Indeed—even in my hometown. And we can shrug our shoulders and curse our fate, or we can work—as readers will see in the issues you have planned for Chronicles over the next year—to remind others of what we have lost, and work to restore some part of it. Even if we have to use such tools as Facebook.

Facebook and other social media can lead to that same sort of fragmentation and dispersion as well—only a fool would deny that. But unlike TV or radio, Facebook can be used to draw people together—by which I don't mean in "virtual reality," but in the real world. As I mentioned, my 25-year high-school reunion was planned on Facebook, and some classmates who had disappeared after graduation and thus had never learned of previous reunions were found through Facebook and made it to this one. My cousins and I are planning my grandmother's 100th birthday party the same way. With scores of people involved, Facebook has actually made it easier to pick a date that will work for most and to coordinate plans than more traditional means of communication would have.

These are things—indeed, I'll go so far as to say good things—that TV and radio simply cannot facilitate.

Is it "touchy-feely sentimentalism" to "invest much in communication with distant friends and relations"? Perhaps. But I think an argument can be made that it is a half-step back toward the reality that has been shattered by TV and radio.

Ellen was about as far as you could get from the stereotype of the "typical Facebook user." Her passion in life was rare books and manuscripts; Oxford-trained, she was responsible for organizing and cataloging several of the most important collections of rare Bibles and Christian texts in the United States, discovering a number of one-of-a-kind books and manuscripts in the process. Her talent did not go unnoticed: In 2001, she was chosen as the curator for the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit on its five-year trip around the United States.

We lost touch after high school, reconnecting a few years ago on Facebook. Back problems and unexplainable migraines and vertigo had brought an early end to her promising career. Often unable to leave her parents' home, she found in Facebook a way to keep in touch with friends that she could not see.

Ellen was not able to make our 25-year high-school reunion (planned on Facebook) last August, and I wish that I had had the chance to see her in person once again. But it was physical distance, and her health, that prevented that, not Facebook. As skeptical as I am of the long-term benefits of Facebook, I am grateful today, as I mourn her loss and pray for the repose of her soul, that it gave me a little more time with Ellen.