The tri-state water war, a la Will Shakespeare

Lady Justice is blind, but perhaps less blind than she’d like us to believe. Once in a while, she sneaks a peek from behind her famous blindfold to see what’s really going on out here in the real world.

Now, I’m not saying that explains this week’s court decision to restore Atlanta’s right to draw water from Lake Lanier. I’m not saying that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals was influenced in any way by extra-legal considerations, such as the fact that if they had ruled against Georgia, they would have inflicted very real, permanent pain on hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent people.

However, I do know this much: Under a 2009 decision by U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson, metro Atlanta was scheduled to lose access to Lake Lanier as a primary source of drinking water. Whatever its legal merits, that decision meant that come July 2012, hundreds of thousands of metro residents would be left high and dry, denied access to a large government-owned lake that is just miles from their doorstep and brimming with water.

That simply wasn’t going to happen, and with the deadline drawing closer, the only authority capable of ensuring it didn’t happen was the federal judiciary. Whatever its motivation, law or practicality, the 11th Circuit took the only course open to it by ruling as it did.

Magnuson’s intentions were honorable. He set the July 2012 deadline, which even he acknowledged was “draconian,” in hopes it would force Georgia, Florida and Alabama to come to an agreement about how to share the water in Lake Lanier and the Chattahoochee River.

In Georgia’s case, the deadline had its desired effect. State leadership that had earlier pooh-poohed water conservation and planning began to take stewardship of our shared water resources much more seriously, as a way to demonstrate our good intentions to our neighbors.

But Magnuson badly misread how Florida and Alabama would react. His deadline gave the two states no incentive whatsoever to negotiate. To the contrary, they knew that without access to water in Lake Lanier, economic development in metro Atlanta would grind to a halt and the region would contract, with our neighbors picking up the pieces.

All they had to do was to sit back, wait and let Georgia suffer the consequences.

In their ruling overturning Magnuson, the three appellate judges cite a variety of legal cases as precedent. However, the most obvious and famous precedent comes not from the legal world but from classic literature, more particularly Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.

Top 10 Famous Blind People

Of all of the disabilities in the world, blindness can be one of the most difficult ones to deal with. Whether a person is born blind or loses their sight at some later point in their lifetime, the inability to see can make everything a person does more challenging. Of course, challenges are meant to be overcome, and we all admire those who rise above the most difficult challenges. Consider these famous blind people (some of whom we’ll bet you didn’t even know were blind) and the accomplishments they have added to the world around them…a world they couldn’t even see. Your eyesight doesn’t need to be 20/20 to see that, although blind, these people had true vision.

Olympic runner Marla Runyan never let her disability slow her down. Born in 1969 in Santa Maria, California, Runyan has Stargardt’s disease, a degenerative eye condition that caused her to become legally blind. A three-time national champion in the women’s 5000 meter, Runyan competed in the 1500-meter finals at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

An avid marathon runner with a master’s degree in special education, Runyan is a professional motivational speaker, encouraging people to look past barriers and reach their full potential. She said she was inspired to succeed as a young child, after a doctor told her that her blindness would prevent her from achieving success in life.

Runyan also reaches out to children and families dealing with vision loss. “The future is not written and you have control about how you respond to the vision loss,” she has said. “Your child will show you what he or she wants to do.”

The namesake for one of the world’s most coveted honors was also legally blind. Joseph Pulitzer, of whom the esteemed Pulitzer Prize for journalism, music and literature is named, was born in Mako, Hungary in 1847 and emigrated to the United States in 1864, where he began his reporting career. Pulitzer soon made a segue way into politics, winning a state legislature seat in Missouri. He was known for his hard stance against corruption and illegal gain.

In 1872, he bought the St. Louis Post and later the St. Louis Dispatch, which he combined with the Post. Pulitzer used his political clout and investigative reporting skills to expose illegal lotteries, gambling rings and tax dodgers. In 1883, he bought New York World and worked to expose the seedy underbelly of public government waste and fraud.

Blind people, their works and ways; with sketches of the lives of some famous blind men

Blind people, their works and ways : with sketches of the lives of some famous blind men

The Scrap book

Herder's aesthetics and the European Enlightenment

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