There is a story. It was written in 1973 by Ursula LeGuin, and it’s entitled “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In its essence, the story presents a utopian city whose successes and virtues all rest on the misery of a child confined in a basement room barely larger than a broom closet. The people of Omelas fall into two groups – those who accept the child’s misery as the cost of maintaining all the virtues of the city and those who walk away.

This is obviously an artificial dichotomy, and a fictional device to raise a question, and what that question might be has been the subject of discussions and arguments about the meaning of the story, its moral issues, and various take-offs for more than fifty years. Now, I certainly haven’t read all the philosophizing and stories/novels arising out of that story, but those I have read seem to tiptoe around one other aspect of the story, an aspect particularly pertinent to the present social/culture issues of today.

The United States is facing and not handling particularly well a number of social/political issues, all of which have negative impacts on someone or some group of individuals. No matter how one handles the issues around abortion and maternal health, in a great many instances someone is going to get hurt and die. In the case of gender issues, someone is going to be disadvantaged, hurt, or worse – no matter what law or policy is adopted. The same is true of immigration.

LeGuin’s story unrealistically simplifies the issue – one child versus the greater good of an entire city, and those who cannot accept that price must leave.

More than a half century ago, when I was in college, one of my professors defined the goal of government as “the greatest good for the greatest number.” It’s hard to argue against that generality, but what’s always bothered me about that definition is that it doesn’t address the fundamental and largely untouched of issue of how society should define the “greatest good.”

According to the Constitution, Congress is supposed to define that greater or greatest good through legislation, but right now, we have a President who is redefining the greater good by his standards, and a Congress unable to oppose him because the institution cannot agree on what’s best for the country… and, unhappily, that makes fictional Omelas look better by comparison.

The other day I got to thinking – again – about how family affects children, sometimes long after they’re children.

My father was an attorney, but he’d just passed the bar exam and married my mother in June of 1941. After Pearl Harbor, he applied for a commission in the Navy. He was accepted and spent the next five years as a Navy officer, largely as communications officer on a fast troop transport that saw a great deal of action in the Pacific. After the war, he returned to law but remained in the Naval Reserve until multiple back operations required medical retirement. Although his legal expertise was securities law, he also loved literature and wrote a number of short stories on the side but was unsuccessful in getting any published. He also played the piano and wrote songs, and was offered a job in Hollywood, but chose law school instead. He became quite successful as an attorney and even was a town councilor and mayor protem of a small town outside Denver.

I definitely did not inherit any musical talent, but I was headed for a legal career and was two years into college during the early part of the Vietnam War when the Cuban Missile crisis occurred. I realized that as a healthy and athletic young man I was far too likely to be drafted, and I had no desire to be in the Army. So I joined the Naval Reserve in the ROC program (since abolished) which required regular reserve meetings and OCS training for two summers. I graduated on schedule and was promptly ordered to duty as an ensign assigned to an assault boat unit. I was soon deployed to Vietnam, but not before applying to be a Naval Aviator. I had a short deployment in Vietnam before my orders came through for flight school. Somehow, I survived flight training and four years as a helo driver (both carrier and non-carrier postings in the Pacific), after which I had to decide whether to go career or leave active duty.

Along the way, I realized that while I was a more than competent pilot, I was not a great pilot. So I opted for civilian life and applied to law schools. I was accepted… and came to the conclusion that I really didn’t want to be a lawyer. Instead, I took a job as an industrial economist, which didn’t work out, then failed miserably as a real estate agent, before spending a year writing short stories, and selling far too few to support a family (and four children by then).

I was involved in local politics and that led to a temporary job as a campaign researcher and writer, which turned into a position as a legislative assistant in Washington, D.C., followed by other political positions most often held by lawyers, eighteen years worth. All the time, I was writing and getting published on the side, until I finally left Washington for New Hampshire to become a full-time writer.

And, in a way, I ended up with a life-pattern far more like my father’s than I’d ever anticipated, or realized until recently, although he stayed married and totally in love with his college sweetheart from the time he met her until he died more than 60 years later, and it took me three tries on that front (but my wife the opera singer and college professor and I have been married for 34 years).

Then, as she, and my offspring, well know, I can be totally clueless about some aspects of life.

How many times have you read an article or heard a commercial saying that there’s just one thing that you just HAVE to have? I suppose there are occasions where this might be true, but I suspect that’s largely an overstatement. There are certainly products that can make life easier, but in my experience, the items one has to have fall into three categories: (1) those you must have and already possess; (2) those you must have and cannot afford or cannot obtain; (3) those you need but don’t realize that you need (often until it’s too late to avoid damage, disaster, or mere inconvenience).

But beyond that, the idea that there’s just one product or service that’s vital tends to ignore a basic fact of life. Everything requires something else. Fire requires oxygen, a fuel source, and a means of ignition. For that fire to last requires a benign environment or protection from a hostile environment. Even a simple screwdriver requires the right tip to fit the screw and enough force/torque to screw or unscrew.

As a different facet of this dynamic, when a disaster occurs, too many analysts (and media pundits) immediately start searching for and speculating on what principal factor led to that disaster. Only in very rare cases does a disaster result from a single factor or failure. Often, a disaster is caused by a combination of factors, many of which may be minor in themselves, and all of which were required to cause the disaster.

But multi-factor analysis isn’t usually the strength of the media, besides which, multiple contributing causes don’t grab the headlines or draw the attention to the products of the organizations sponsoring media outlets.

So, the “one thing you have to have” and the one failure that caused the disaster will remain a staple of the news/commercial media for now… and likely for so long as money and human nature dominate news and commerce.

The other day, I got to thinking about why the Department of Homeland Security could unilaterally change immigration laws so that people who were legally in the country one day were classified as illegal immigrants the next. To me that seemed so at odds with the ex post facto clause in the Constitution.

The answer to that question is a bit frightening.

While the Constitution prohibits specifically retroactive laws (Article I, Section 9, Clause 3), this prohibition applies only to criminal cases, not civil matters, and immigration is considered a civil matter, even when the government is using criminal justice mechanisms, such as incarceration facilities and police powers, or carrying out actions like deportation or visa revocation.

Despite the fact that immigration is considered a civil matter, illegal immigration is made a federal crime in the United States, primarily through 8 U.S.C. § 1325 (Improper Entry by Alien) and 8 U.S.C. § 1326 (Reentry of Removed Aliens)

The classification of immigration as a civil matter is not addressed in the Constitution, but was established by in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893). This ruling also determined that deportation is not “punishment” in the legal sense, but rather the government’s refusal to allow someone to remain, and because they are not considered “punishments,” Congress or the Executive Branch can retroactively apply new immigration grounds for exclusion, even if those grounds did not exist when the non-citizen entered the country. In addition, statutes, such as those that make past criminal activity grounds for deportation (e.g., membership in certain organizations or criminal behavior), can be applied to actions taken before the law was passed.

So, if every major law dealing with unauthorized immigration is a criminal statute, how can immigration enforcement be a merely civil matter?

As a side note, while subsequent Supreme Court decisions have maintained the legal fiction established by the Fong Yue Ting precedent, I can’t find any legal reason why Congress couldn’t pass a law declaring that any immigration proceedings should be considered as criminal matters, given that the government is already treating them that way, except without many of the procedural safeguards required Constitutionally in criminal proceedings involving U.S. citizens.

In 1915, Amy Lowell wrote a poem entitled “Patterns,” most likely set in the time of The War of the Spanish Succession, about love constrained and lost by adherence to patterns, particularly social patterns and patterns of expectation.

Patterns are everywhere in nature, simply because patterns are a form of order, and life, and even the universe, requires order. But the closing line of Lowell’s poem asks, “Christ! What are patterns for?” A strong poetic suggestion that patterns in excess are anything but good.

In a very different context, laws attempt to impose patterns. Those patterns are meant to create societal order, but enforcing laws in excess can be tyranny. That’s one reason most societies have legal procedures and courts – to determine how the patterns of law should be imposed, and in what instances that such patterns should not blindly apply.

In dictatorships and authoritarian societies, patterns are imposed absolutely, and too often now, ICE is following that example here in the U.S.

The problem with ICE and its actions lies in the working assumption that anyone not legally in the United States is de facto a criminal and evil, and that they all can be treated in the same way.

What makes this worse, and I’d say evil, is that the Trump Administration, with various strokes of the pen, have turned tens of thousands of people who were here legally one day into illegals the next by revoking various policies of past administrations, ranging from broad cancellations of student visas to revoking work permits for refugees and others, and removing amnesty protections.

ICE agents are also too often applying a specific pattern (skin color) in initially approaching and detaining individuals.

Lowell’s question applies even more today. Exactly what are patterns (or laws) for?