Kelo takes more than land

SCOTUS opened up a Pandora's Box with the Kelo decision and first to escape is greed. The Agitator stands at the floodgates and counts the victims being swept up as the deluge begins. Radley discovers there have been 10,000 eminent domain cases in the last five years. You can multiply that times ten now, as every big bucks developer will want to get in on the deal.

I've already blogged my reaction here, so I won't repeat it except to say, compensated or not, it's still a form of forfeiture without the tiresome bother of having to prove a nexus to illegal activity. It's like taking the ring that has been handed down for generations in your family and giving you the dollar value in compensation. Maybe it's even enough to buy a better stone, but it won't be the family ring with the barely legible engraving inside. Say what you will, stealing personal history is still theft in my book, even if you can't quantify its monetary worth.

I was five when Interstate 84 was built in my town and they took the home of some family friends by eminent domain. They were an elderly couple. I called them Grandma and Grandpa. They had an extraordinary cherry tree in their yard. It was huge and had the sweetest fruit. They had planted it as a sapling. It was the first tree I ever climbed. I remember crying when my mother told me they cut it down to build the highway.

Grandma and Grandpa got a better house out of the deal. It was bigger and newer with much more land. It had a big rec room with a wet bar and it was fun to play with the swizzle stick collection, but it was never the same. There were no cherries. In fact there wasn't a mature planting on the property and the couple didn't live long enough to see their grandchildren climb another tree. How do you compensate for that?