The Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos, with the Rio Grande valley and the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the background. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory
As one of my wise friends pointed out, it’s a right we will all have—whether we want it or not—at some point. But before that “precipice,” as she calls it, there is another factor: no incident from our past is ever forgotten now and we know the reason why.
In this case, a forty-two-year-old man is making a legal case for “the right to be forgotten”—right now. He’s been pursued for two decades by a foolish escapade, endlessly reported, of an arrest for riding a motorcycle when he was drunk. A long time ago, a different man, a different life—but he can never rid himself of this story.
For me, this unfortunate fact connects with what seems to be a national unwillingness to forget—at least if what is remembered is negative. Teenage mistakes, paid for with a fine and a reprimand, become the defining factor for lives lived with maturity and even with some shred of social awareness.
Here in New Mexico, the legislature—the last unpaid representative body in the country—narrowly averted passing a law that would have allowed a judge to keep an accused but not convicted person in jail for weeks or even months pending her or his trial.
Innocent till proven guilty seems to be a constitutional right we are willing to give up. As two potential jury members said, “Anyone the police picks up is guilty.” In that case the constitutional right to innocence until proven guilty is turned on its head, becoming guilty until proved innocent—often a long process.
It’s hard to stay hopeful. I am still mourning the poisoning of our neighborhood bear who visited my bird feeder regularly for years. Someone—perhaps a city dweller recently moved into these mountains—was frightened and put out strychnine. It took the unfortunate creature two weeks to die, in agony.
Now as we prod and prod another bear, this a Russian one, I wonder how much of our impetus toward war is part of the federal government’s funding of more plutonium pits here at Los Alamos. After all we have to have an excuse to increase our “nuclear arsenal,” already many times larger than is needed to blow up the whole world.
Well, innocent till proven guilty? A sword with two edges.
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