I don’t know what would posses me to spend three or four hours cleaning a set of hinges. Maybe I was unhinged. In the process of remodeling our kitchen I decided to redo the back door. It had suffered a lot of drying from the southern sun and needed a new coat of varnish. As I was driving out the bent hinge pins I couldn’t help but notice the accumulation of dozens of layers of paint. Paint was so built up that it had literally dripped off the ends to form stalactite like lumps. I decided to remove the paint and in the process I discovered something beautiful under all of the ugliness and abuse.
Hidden under layers of casually, sloppily applied paint, hidden layer by layer was an intricate design. The hinges are cast iron, not a fancy material but one which served the manufacturers and consumers of this nation well for many years. Sturdy products like stoves, cook ware, furnaces, engine blocks, etc were cast in simple iron. It is not surprising that a simple structure like our house, built in the 1840s, would have cast iron hinges. Who would have thought that those pieces of hardware, with
no other function than to hold up a door, would have any embellishment? (The importance of a door and its function of protecting one from bad weather and intruders will have more relevance later in this posting.) Successive generations ignored the beauty, abused the outmoded cast iron, and caught up in newer materials, too busy to care, simply painted over the design.
As I sat there on my back stoop picking out pieces of paint with a box knife, periodically soaking the hinges in paint stripper, I had plenty of time to think about things. For example, what sort of person would choose expediency over beauty? Who was so busy they couldn’t take the time to wipe off the paint? What was lost in their haste?
There is something else on a grander scale that came to me while sitting and picking on my back stoop. Our basic foundation, our Constitution and our Bill of Rights were once simple and beautiful in their essential design. The people of this nation were supported and protected by them, and although fairly simple, these documents were embellished with loving care by the founders of this nation. Successive generations have overlaid that simple beauty with ugly layers of obfuscation, distorting the origin
al clarity and purity of design. Each generation of lawyers and politicians, hundreds of special interest groups, have layered it with their ugliness. Ugliness, and by extension distortion, are found in the strangest places. I was just looking at a website last night for the SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center. What does that, SPLC, mean? Take a minute and go there. Look at their seven pages of “Patriots.” This is a list of people they derisively call patriots but whom they describe as anti-government, anarchists, terrorists, etc. Who is covering up what with white paint? Some of the people on this list may be marginal and misdirected but all of them believe in the fundamental nature of the Consitution. That belief does not give the SPLC the right to equate the word Patriot with Terrorist. The majority of the people on the list were also my age. Maybe we are the last generation to remember the beauty of cast iron. Which hinge do you prefer, and is it worth your time to remove the layers of ugliness? You have to decide for yourself.
Hidden under layers of casually, sloppily applied paint, hidden layer by layer was an intricate design. The hinges are cast iron, not a fancy material but one which served the manufacturers and consumers of this nation well for many years. Sturdy products like stoves, cook ware, furnaces, engine blocks, etc were cast in simple iron. It is not surprising that a simple structure like our house, built in the 1840s, would have cast iron hinges. Who would have thought that those pieces of hardware, with
no other function than to hold up a door, would have any embellishment? (The importance of a door and its function of protecting one from bad weather and intruders will have more relevance later in this posting.) Successive generations ignored the beauty, abused the outmoded cast iron, and caught up in newer materials, too busy to care, simply painted over the design.As I sat there on my back stoop picking out pieces of paint with a box knife, periodically soaking the hinges in paint stripper, I had plenty of time to think about things. For example, what sort of person would choose expediency over beauty? Who was so busy they couldn’t take the time to wipe off the paint? What was lost in their haste?
There is something else on a grander scale that came to me while sitting and picking on my back stoop. Our basic foundation, our Constitution and our Bill of Rights were once simple and beautiful in their essential design. The people of this nation were supported and protected by them, and although fairly simple, these documents were embellished with loving care by the founders of this nation. Successive generations have overlaid that simple beauty with ugly layers of obfuscation, distorting the origin
al clarity and purity of design. Each generation of lawyers and politicians, hundreds of special interest groups, have layered it with their ugliness. Ugliness, and by extension distortion, are found in the strangest places. I was just looking at a website last night for the SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center. What does that, SPLC, mean? Take a minute and go there. Look at their seven pages of “Patriots.” This is a list of people they derisively call patriots but whom they describe as anti-government, anarchists, terrorists, etc. Who is covering up what with white paint? Some of the people on this list may be marginal and misdirected but all of them believe in the fundamental nature of the Consitution. That belief does not give the SPLC the right to equate the word Patriot with Terrorist. The majority of the people on the list were also my age. Maybe we are the last generation to remember the beauty of cast iron. Which hinge do you prefer, and is it worth your time to remove the layers of ugliness? You have to decide for yourself. 
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