One 10-Year-Old's Birthday Party

One of my favorite clients, the Wikimedia Foundation, tonight celebrated the tenth birthday of its largest project, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that is dedicated to becoming the largest repository of human knowledge, freely available to all, that the world has ever seen.

The cake at our local celebration here in downtown San Francisco, weighed 250 pounds before it was cut and eaten.

Meanwhile, some 400 parties were occurring all over the world, because Wikipedia is not a U.S.-centric project but the result of a global movement of people who believe that access to information should be free, regardless of whether you are rich or poor, live in a poor country or a rich country, or have lots of bandwith or very little.

Wikipedia is for everybody.

As I watched my friends and colleagues celebrate tonight, I was struck by how this community of people has transcended politics and all other trivial pursuits.

Wikipedia strives to be objective, fair, unbiased. The movement that sustains it is dedicated to knowledge, which is a very different thing from opinion. In this way, Wikipedia is a living example of journalistic ideals.

Truth has never been "left" and never been "right." Truth is about respecting others, and including everyone in the search for answers to the questions that no one person on this earth possesses. Truth is what we all can agree to.
Truth is what you can read on Wikipedia.

-30-

Somewhere in Time

Everything, including a random sequence of words, appears for a reason. Thus, there is a line that was buried in one of my asynchronous posts the other day that I now must reprise:

“Nice people don't do nice things to be nice; they do them because they are nice.”

***

One time, somebody I know was feeling very much alone when a sweet voice came to him and said, “Write a letter.”

This letter was not to be mailed via the postal system, or as an email message. Instead, it was to be entrusted to one of the Pacific Seagulls that abound all along the California coast.

This particular letter was to move through slow time, which is far from what most of us experience these days.  It was not to be understood in the present circumstances of either the writer or the recipient. It was meant to be from the future of one, and to the future of the other.

Unless it could be done that way, it wasn’t to be written (or read) at all.

My friend agreed to these terms. Here is the letter that resulted:

Waking up in the night, I thought of you. And, as has happened many times before, I started composing a letter to you in my mind. But then an odd thing happened. The letter kept changing, morphing, iterating much like software does.

It seemed like this letter, above all others, was actually a living creature.

At first the letter stayed in the past, first with visions of careless, happy times, and then, inevitably, to my hopeless confusion at the way those times ended.

The letter then got stuck there for a very long time, and I felt nothing but simmering anger, resentment, disbelief and a horrible sense of guilt.

But then, as the letter kept rewriting itself, all of those initial emotions gradually began to fade. One by one, every negative feeling shriveled up and floated above me, waiting to be carried somewhere far away.

It was then that the bird came into view -- white and gray, huge, majestic, soaring high above, looking down at me. I knew this bird had come to take it all away. This was a way to let go of everything bad and sorrowful from the past, including all of my regrets.

So I did let them go. But at the end of all that, the bird still was waiting for me to give up one last thing, something I’d been hiding all along. It looked at me with an expression that meant, “Yes, that too has to die.” I hesitated, then released my grip. And the bird away flew with our future, the one that never got the chance to be.

Beyond the Continental Shelf, the bird dropped all of this baggage, which promptly sank below the waves, down to the benthos, where no light can reach. There, nothing is seen and nothing is heard. It is the one place on earth of perfect nothingness -- a suitable resting place for all of our least wanted feelings.

Then the bird flew on, moving now more like a giant eagle, with a new lightness of spirit and grace until I lost all sight of it.

At this point, I became drowsy and the pictures in my mind, though hazy, turned back to the past again, but this time, for the first time, their substance had changed. Now the memories were only of the good things, the wonderful things, times of kindness and of generosity -- both given and received. And it came to me that these need not die, they are real and true and can endure forever. No bird need ever need come to carry them away.

Reliving all of the beauty brought tears to my eyes, not of sadness, but of gratitude. I realized how wonderful we both are. And the line came to me:

 “Nice people don't do nice things to be nice; they do them because they are nice.”

When I awoke, my mood was truly tranquil for the first time in months. And I still felt only that one thing – gratitude.

Should this letter, on the wings of an eagle, ever reach all the way from me to you, far out into our common future, perhaps then we will fully share -- for the very first time -- a sense of gratitude that truly extends both ways.

Because that is what’s deserved by two very nice people, and also because that is the one thing that need never die. 

-30-

Questions That Remain

Seeing life, with all of its imperfections and sadness, through the eyes of a child is one of the most emotionally sensitive places you can allow yourself to venture. I thought about that tonight as I watched President Obama deliver his speech -- part elegy, part lecture, part inspiration -- in Tucson.

It was when he invoked the world as seen through the eyes of the little nine-year-old girl who was killed in last Saturday's tragedy that Obama touched a sensitive nerve, not just with his audience but within himself.

His wife wiped away tears that couldn't be restrained at those moments, and for an instant, anyone with a heart could sense how similar we all are, on the inside. We all hope for a better world for our children. We all expect to pass away long before they do. We all can empathize with their fears and hopes and demons and dreams.

It's when you try to see the world through the eyes of the nine-year-old who was cruelly and senselessly struck down by bullets that you feel the true weight of the darkness that resides among us as a people and as a species. That anyone could do what that gunman did last Saturday in Arizona, for any reason, remains unthinkable.

And yet that type of violence happens all the time, though usually on a smaller scale and with less public attention. In this speech, Obama summoned the emotions that -- if you allowed them in -- unleashed a wave of common grief over this sad state of affairs.

Somehow, despite all the tragedies and all the awful things that happen, some sort of essential human spirit endures. Even as one child was lost, other children hope and dream her same hopes and dreams. Some of those may even be realized on some future day.

I hope that as most people watched that ceremony tonight, they reacted just as people and not as adherents of any political philosophy, or with any agenda to push. It was an imperfect speech to be sure -- too long and rambling, and delivered at a university campus, a forum that somehow did not seem as solemn or spiritual as it should have been.

But that is how the survivors in Arizona apparently wanted to express the combination of grief at their loss and their commitment to a common future -- at more of a revival meeting than a wake. Still, the President handled himself gracefully and evoked the little girl's spirit in a way that couldn't fail to move anyone able to consider his meaning.

Our own losses, however painful, mostly pale next to those on a traumatic day like last Saturday in Tucson. As I listened to all the speeches tonight, and looked at the faces of the victims' families, I yearned for a society that can rise above partisanship and rhetoric to civility and a commitment to finding a consensus on the issues that matter. Not because division caused the killings but because divisions injure us in other ways,

But I'm not sure that this society can do that at this time. I don't know that we will come through this latest assassination attempt any closer at all to those ideals. The coming days and weeks will reveal whether we are capable of that, or whether we are not.

Obama chose a striking word to describe our lives -- "fleeting."  Our existence is indeed fleeting, even if most of us most of the time behave as if we had forgotten that. Maybe it is necessary for most of us to deny our mortality to endure our daily routines. Maybe.

Just like many may choose to ignore this opportunity to alter the overly divisive brand of character assassination that seems to have taken root in this land's political culture.

I'm not speaking here of any faction but of the body politic as a whole. One that a young President tried to prod back to civility tonight, even though many will find fault, some of it legitimate, in his attempt.

No one and nothing is perfect. We know that about each other. But the question is whether we can embrace each other's imperfections and make common cause together. I don't know the answer, but I do know that that is the question.

***

Across the years to other nights in another stage of life, now gone, I remember having telephone conversations, sweet and long. But the time of longing to hear a certain voice and then being able to satisfy that longing by the simple act of picking up a telephone has passed. It's little comfort now that night after night, across the barriers of time and place, across the mighty ocean, our conversations continued -- during an entire year of separation.

This was much like the state of military couples or others separated by work or circumstance for long stretches of time. Still, when the phone rang, no matter how late at night, my day was able to end in a most satisfactory way. Those times now are gone, never to return, not in that way or with the  innocence that has since been lost.

Most endings in life are uncomfortable. Rarely do they come at a time or in a way we would choose. More often, they are abrupt, unwanted and discordant. Sometimes all that is left afterward is anger; others an ineffable sadness. Most of my life, I've been prone to imagining alternative endings from those that have caused me the most angst.

As each of my parents died before my eyes, I imagined that somehow, at the last minute, doctors were able to revive them. When my marriages ended, I imagined us getting back together, and how happy that would make our children.

None of those things ever came to pass. Instead, everything passed away.

That's how things end, we know. What we don't know is how or when or where or even if a new life for us will begin. Will we be granted another chance? And if so, will we still be able to once again  imagine a new future as through the eyes of a child?

Again I don't know the answer, but I do know that that is the question.


-30-

All I Do Not Know

Tracing and retracing routes across the city I've followed thousands of times; still always seeing new details. Just a glance here and there -- the screen of a flat-panel TV displaying programming through two windows -- one in the house and one in my car. A dark-haired woman out for a stroll and a smoke, smiling at me as I piled the kids into the car. I wonder who she is?

Inside Safeway, an Asian woman in a black coat was waiting for her coffee at the Starbucks counter while I was checking out. For some reason, her presence exerted a power on me. Then, a few blocks away, she passed me, carrying her coffee while I pumped gas into my little gray car.

Then again, a few moments later, as I navigated through traffic toward my house, there she was again, still cradling a coffee and still walking determinedly somewhere. I'm quite sure she never noticed me, and also that I'll never see her again.

Or maybe I will.

Some very sad news tonight: An old friend has passed suddenly and unexpectedly. I'm feeling sad, especially for her family; I just saw them two months ago for the first time in a while. She was a private person, so I will not say any more about this here.

Another reminder of how fragile we all are, how limited our time here is, and how if we don't seize opportunities when they present themselves, they may never come our way again.

Jesus I am bad at disconnection. I don't admire people better at this than I am because I cannot understand them at all. The loneliest moments in life are those awful moments of disconnection when it was the last thing you thought would happen.

Some people do more nice things than others do. Nice people don't do nice things to be nice; they do them because they are nice.

Maybe it's a good thing, I tell myself, that I am noticing little details again for the first time in a while.

My daughter painted the picture at the top of this post earlier tonight. It might be a city, she said, or it might be a set of panels set up one next to the other.

As the words keep tumbling out of me, I know that what I'm actually doing here is trying to connect. Ninety-nine percent of the people who read these words never contact me and that's okay. The occasional person who says they like my writing, that they get something from it, they are the ones who keep me going.

Rarely, but it happens, I sense a new reader. Actually, that has only happened once. That was a most special circumstance that won't be repeating itself, I know. Yet someone might be reading these words on their last night alive on earth; or, one of these times, the blending of letters and words and sentences and paragraphs may be the last ones that ever come out of me on this earth. It's bound to happen sooner or later.

That is why I write. You never know when it will be your last time. The reason I hate disconnection? Isn't it clear: we all will be disconnecting, not by our choice, one of these days, so why would we ever do it purposely?

Of course, feelings change, sometimes in mysterious ways, and people part.  Just as suddenly as we find one another we can lose one another. The real question is whether we can ever find one another after all of that has happened?

That's one of many questions I do not know the answer to. In fact, tonight, maybe it's the weather, or my sadness -- mainly about the trials of others -- or maybe it is a gradually unfolding epiphany, but I'm acutely aware that I know nothing much at all. I'm still discovering how much I don't know day over week over month over year.

Two seagulls, large, white and gray, lift off in front of my car as I round a corner. Their powerful wingspans take a moment to unfurl; I take my foot off the accelerator instinctively and then realize what a foolish thing that was of me to do. Your car cannot ever catch a seagull, any more than can a dog chasing them at the beach.

My voracious reading habit has expanded to Kevin Kelly's brilliant new book, What Technology Wants. I know Kevin from my Wired years; he's always been far out ahead of any curve having to do with what is broadly known as the digital revolution.

His idea that technology is a living force, just as much as we are, and that it in fact is much older than homo sapiens on this planet, is provocative.  That technology is reproducing itself now, outside of any human influence, may frighten some people.

But read the book and you will be comforted.

The sun rises, the sun sets. Your heart soars with the happiness of a new love; then it is broken into a thousand shards that will cut you for weeks, months, maybe even years. Maybe it will even be the death of you. The world at large doesn't care -- how could it? While one person nurses his broken heart, another person has just died. While one person dances with a new lover, another person walks out of someone's door, never to return.

Disconnecting = human folly. You cannot ever disconnect your heart from another's. It doesn't work that way. The problem is that most of us do not know how to listen to what our hearts are trying to tell us. We mistake one feeling for another; we try to suppress the inconvenient feelings as if that will ever be a productive strategy.

Instead, those damn feelings you think you didn't want rise up to disrupt your carefully laid new plans, which assumed that they would do no such thing. Whenever you are nursing a broken heart, people say things like -- go out, meet new people, move on!

That's okay. They mean well. But if keeping moving on and on was all our species needed to reproduce itself, we'd all be itinerant lovers. I have a theory about this, like about most things. (Again, bear in mind that I do not believe I know much of anything; therefore I construct theories all the time, rarely with enough evidence to fill a demi-cup of coffee.)

My love theory goes like this: There is a finite store among us, collectively, so for every heart broken another is given the gift of new love. If this theory is right, we just have to wait for our turn. But it also is another form of sadness, isn't it? For you to find a new love, somebody else has to lose theirs. Sometimes those events are inextricably intertwined, but I don't want to get into that topic.

After they cleared my car, the seagulls gracefully rose into the sky, banked west, and headed out toward the Pacific Ocean. Since I was driving, I couldn't really watch them for more than an instant, so I followed them instead with my mind's eye.

Out over the city, past the beach, high above the waves, I could see them traveling on and on; I don't know why. Perhaps they were headed for a distant land, where all the habits are different from here, even among the birds.

Maybe. Or maybe it was just another one of those sensations that visit me, why or from where all shrouded in mystery. Why would this idea even occur to me? Does it mean something? Rather than birds, maybe what I glimpsed flying away were souls passing beyond this life to whatever lies beyond.

It can be, from time to time, that your senses can be as finely tuned as one of those tuning forks the people back in my boyhood used to locate the most likely place to drill a well. You don't even realize it, but a tiny vibration comes back to you from someone, somewhere who is thinking about you.

Maybe it is a fleeting thought, or maybe it is a prayer. People do pray for one another, especially in times of great stress and sadness. I'm not much good at praying, I've decided. This came up in the bathtub recently. I don't take showers in cold weather; I only take baths. I'm not one to linger in there usually; it's just a matter of getting clean, not some sensuous delight -- at least for me.

But on this occasion, and it may have been the day before yesterday, or maybe further back, I'm not sure. This is not exactly the kind of thing I would normally take note of, but as I knelt there in my bath I suddenly felt like bowing my head and praying.

The first big problem at such moments for me is deciding which god to pray to, but that is easily solved if I just choose to pray to all the gods, whoever and wherever they may be.  (If there was really only one, why would different cultures pray to different gods?  I'm afraid I do not accept the concept that any one race or tribe is the chosen one. To me that is all bullshit, and it always has been.)

The second big problem is bigger than the first one. Because once I solved #1 by praying to a variety of gods, I had to decide what I was praying for. What exactly was it that I wanted to beseech these gods to do for me, anyway?

Well, of course, all of the normal and basic things about health and safety for family, friends and loved ones. Sometimes I forget to include myself in there but on this particular day I remembered and hastily added in a conditional clause that brought me into the picture, hoping that this would be okay with the gods.

After that, however, I was truly stumped. What did I want to pray for? I'll confess I did think of one thing, but I'd already asked for that so many times with no results that the gods have lost their credibility on that topic -- or maybe it was never mine to ask for, anyway.

In the embarrassing silence that followed, none of the gods offered me any help with finding some words to speak. Funny, eh? A writer, a story-teller with no words to speak? But that's the way it was so I abandoned the effort; maybe it was a simple case of prayer-block.

Or maybe the gods don't want to hear from me the things I want to say. That is a sobering thought, but it could well be true. I actually have another theory about that -- about what the gods can handle from us collectively. It may not be as direct as my theory of love, in other words you may not have to wait for someone to lose what it is you are praying for in order to get it. The gods may be more enterprising than that.

Instead, maybe the gods accept your silence in the moment and come back to you later on, with an image that you will have to figure out on your own. From my reading of religious texts (the Bible, the Koran, and a number of Buddhist tracts) I'm leaning to the latter theory.

So maybe that is the why of the seagulls, or maybe even of that striking Asian woman in the black coat, or the mysterious woman who smiled at me in the night, or maybe even why my daughter's painting feels so precious to me on this particular night.

Or maybe it's just one more of the many questions that I don't know the answer to.

-30-

Tucson, Two Days Later

Some events affect our collective consciousness so deeply that time itself seems to slow down. The shootings of 19 people in Tucson Saturday morning is one such event. Millions of Americans are trying to divine some meaning from this tragedy; I'm one of them.

At this point, I confess I don't know what the consequences of the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords will prove to be. What I do know, however, is that our political culture may be poised to experience a major change in tone.

If so, a lone gunman in Arizona may have, ironically, accomplished what no one else has been able to, and that is to lower the temperature of the debate over public issues in this country. As more information emerges, a fairly rational discussion appears to be emerging around some of the key issues:

* access to guns by mentally disturbed people,
* access to health care for mentally troubled people;
* the effects of highly charged political rhetoric and name-calling on civil debate;
* the personal impacts of this type of vitriol on our political leaders and their families;
* the damage to  our society as a whole that occurs when politicians demonize each other;
* the damage that remains when not enough calm, rational voices rise to lead these debates.

***

That the Congresswoman survives, after being shot through her brain, is a miracle that may itself help light our way as a people struggling with these troubling issues. As it happens, much of the reading I've been doing lately not only helps illuminate how remarkable her survival would be, if she pulls through, but also what likely awaits her, and those who love her, in the future.

Antonio Damasio began his treatise, Descartes' Error, by recounting the famous case of Phineas Gage, the nineteenth century man who survived after a metal rod passed through his brain in much the way that bullet passed through Rep. Giffords'. Gage made a remarkable recovery in every way but one; his personality changed completely, transforming what had been a successful, well-adapted man into a self-destructive person doomed to utter failure and a tragic, early death.

The surgeons attending Ms. Giffords believe that the path of the bullet through her brain did not destroy any of the known centers of control over our intellectual, physical, or emotional nature. But the truth is we don't know very much yet about how the brain involves itself in regulating our feelings, our emotional makeup, and the way our feelings get expressed to others.

If the Congresswoman recovers, it will not be apparent for quite some time whether her personality -- her essential nature -- has changed. Scientists don't know, doctors don't know, nobody knows.

***

The two other (former) Democratic members of Congress from Arizona who were "targeted" by Sarah Palin's operation for their support for the health care reform bill have spoken out about the effects her political attacks had on them and their families. Shushannah Walshe has an article in The Daily Beast that is worth a read on this subject.


Perhaps what is most poignant is what one of the former representatives says about being relatively inured to campaign rhetoric herself, but forgetting how much pain it could cause her family members, who of course had not chosen to be public figures or to have to worry about their (mother, in this case) after Palin's ads appeared.


The other targeted candidate had a more personal reaction, and talks about feeling "dehumanized" by the experience, about receiving death threats, and having to eventually stop meeting with constituents in town meetings because all he was greeted with was the shouts from those who differed with his position on health reform.



Palin herself has responded to critics today in an email to Glenn Beck, saying, “I hate violence. I hate war. Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence." An aide says they never intended for the targets to be taken as "gun sights" and never imagined someone might consider them as "violent" in tone.


It is to be expected that all sides will eventually try to exploit the tragedy to push their own agendas; that's the way politics seems to work. But what I hope may tentatively fare better would be the manner in which they continue their endless debates.


Demonizing opponents just because they hold a different position on some issue like health care reform is the type of escalation of tension that obfuscates debate and the evolution of public policy.  It's not democracy, but mob politics, always dangerous, and sometimes fatal. Personally, I cannot stand the rants that are common on Fox News or MSNBC. That one is from the right and the other from the left simply illustrates that neither side has a monopoly on bad taste or stupidity.

If you only watch one of these channels, you are poisoning yourself with your own Kool-Aid. But, frankly, I'd advocate boycotting both if you wish to develop your own unique perspective on the issues of our time. There are plenty of other channels of news that is delivered much more impartially, and effectively where you can accomplish this goal.  (It's called journalism.)


But these vicious personal attacks, on Fox and MSNBC, whether they focus on Obama or Palin or someone else in the public sphere, illuminate nothing useful to those actually interested in figuring out what position to take on complex issues like health care reform. I suspect that the great majority of us find some parts of the bill that was passed useful, perhaps even essential, and other parts useless, perhaps even harmful. But to denounce the entire effort as some sort of evil conspiracy is the product of sick minds; anyone who has struggled with our current health care and health insurance system knows how badly reform is needed.


Name-calling, hate speech, incitements to violent rhetoric if not outright violence itself is of no help whatsoever to the rational citizen who cares enough to try to make sense of it all. It only turns us away from getting involved at all, which is the worst thing that could ever happen to a democracy.


You know, I figured out a long time ago that just because you can say something inflammatory doesn't mean you should. Journalists learn this the hard way, by making mistakes. But we also are forced by our profession to listen carefully to all credible sources and therefore all sides of an issue. We are, as a group, far more about listening than talking.


But when we talk, we are as likely to get into trouble as the next person. Language is a powerful tool with all sorts of hidden hazards. Speaking (or writing) in anger is dangerous and self-destructive. It's hard to take back your words once the relationship between two people has begun to fray.


At some point, further discussion only makes everything worse. You reach that awful moment when there simply is nothing left to say -- and of course I mean this in our private lives every bit as much in our public lives.


In the end, all that remains is deathly silence. And that, for any feeling human being, is the cruelest fate of all.


-30-

Tucson, The Day After

Additional thoughts on the context and consequences of yesterday's assassination attempt that left six dead, including a nine-year-old girl, and 14 wounded:

Most importantly, it is hopeful that the target of the gunner, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, has survived surgery and is able to communicate with doctors. It is notable that several prestigious news organizations reported that she had died yesterday, then had to pull back.

This happens a lot in media these days. Any big event -- earthquakes, shootings, elections -- seems to lead to inaccurate reports by organizations competing to be "first" with the story. Most journalists would tell you it is better to be second and right than to be first and wrong.

The effect of that untrue report -- that she had died -- on people who knew and loved her must have been devastating. But we live in a time when the splintering of media into a thousand channels (which provides many benefits, of course) carries increased risk of inaccurate reporting.

The rest of the reporting on the incident seems to have been fairly accurate. That then brings us to the context. Blogs, such as this one, are places for people to express their opinions about events such as occurred yesterday.

Yes, some of us do break news on blogs, but more often it is hyper-local (or hyper-personal) in nature. Part of what I did yesterday in monitoring the situation was to open Twitscoop, which has a tag cloud of the key terms gaining the most momentum on Twitter.

I fell for the initial reports of her death because all sources indicated she had been shot through the head at point-blank range. Very few people survive such attacks. But as I watched Twitscoop, I developed doubts about the death report. The keyword "died" did grow for a moment but then it started shrinking.

This is a fairly good way to assess what millions of people are absorbing from various sources, mostly other media channels. The "crowd" will get things right more often than not if you just give it a few minutes to sort through all the noise.

We live in a media-saturated society, which causes all manner of trouble for most of us. We also live in a state of "always on" to a frightening degree, where feeling connected has replaced being connected to other people. This worries me a lot.

The political context of this shooting, as I indicated yesterday and last night (when hundreds of people visited this tiny site) indeed raises the question of over-heated rhetoric by political leaders. Most major news organizations reported the Palin webpage last night and this morning -- it is directly relevant in that Rep. Giffords was specifically "targeted" on the map with the familiar symbol of a gun target on her name.

The problem was not the word "targeted;" that is used by political figures all the time, as in which districts to target in upcoming campaigns. And to be fair to Palin, that is what she meant no doubt by her usage.

The problem was the symbol of a gun target. That transformed the meaning of an everyday political  term, embellishing it with dangerous implications and suggesting a call to action. I'm sure Palin and her supporters thought of it as funny, perhaps even tongue-in-cheek.

But that isn't how it was received. Rep. Giffords herself was aware of Palin's campaign against her and other Democrats, and expressed her concerns publicly, as I noted yesterday. After the shooting, of course, Palin quickly removed the website with its explosive imagery, and I doubt she, at least, will revert to that style of rhetoric anytime soon.

All politicians tend to use over-heated rhetoric at times; Obama's widely-quoted campaign statement that if others brought knives to the fight, he'd bring a gun is an example. I would no more defend that than Palin's, but I would note it did not come close to resembling a call to action. It was clearly a reference to how ugly political infighting can become; still, it was an error on his part, and something I'm sure he now regrets.

Perhaps all politicians will now, at least for a while, refrain from such excess. It is absolutely true that the attacks on Obama and on Democrats in general have reached a feverish pitch unparalleled in modern political history. Historians will conclude, I believe, that Obama's race was a central component of the rhetorical excesses used by those on the right after he became President.

But I was also disturbed during the Bush, Jr., years by leftists who made statements like "Bush and Cheney should die." I posted here on one occasion the little-known fact that both Bush and Cheney were generous philanthropists, who did their good deeds with a minimum of public notice.

Beyond that, I don't think it is appropriate to state that public officials should die, or even imply this, simply because of how vulnerable those officials are to attack in this gun-crazed culture of ours. As we all now know too well, members of Congress have little or no security at their numerous public events.

So any nut with a gun can wreak havoc. I won't even get into the many tragedies in schools or other mass shootings that make this country a scary place to many people around the world living in places where gun ownership is more tightly regulated.

Oh, I get the Second Amendment and all that; I was a hunter and still own my own shotgun, etc., and I understand the fear of an honest person that if they have no weapons, an evil person may assault them, leaving them every bit as vulnerable as the Congresswoman was yesterday.

But the notion that the federal government is some sort of evil monster that will suppress the rights of free people unless the latter are heavily armed and form militias to defend against that happening is a delusion. A dangerous delusion.

What the federal government can rightly be said to be is a set of runaway bureaucracies that waste taxpayer money, and that tie many of us up in red tape. It also is home to a truly evil IRS that audits honest citizens and takes away their money -- much as any other bully would.

These aspects of government make me angry and at times I might even use an expletive or two about the situation. But I'm not delusional about these bureaucratic forces, nor do I feel powerless to resist them. I can, and do, vote for candidates who pledge to bring government waste under control, although I have noticed that most politicians of any stripe tend to talk the talk more than they actually walk the walk once they are in office.

The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives swept to power promising to cut "$100 billion" of government waste. Last I checked, once in power, they had reduced this to "around $50 billion," maybe.

Not that Republicans are any more likely to make excessive promises than Democrats. There are plenty of similar examples from both major parties.

It is time for reasonable people to be heard. Those who simply shout out conspiracy theories and hate speech may seem to hold sway in this society at the moment, but there are many more of us who are disgusted by their excesses than support them.

It is to be deeply hoped that yesterday's tragedy finally encourages the voices of reason to take our country's political debate back from the extremists. They've had their run the past two years, and they got themselves pretty worked up by drinking their own Kool-Aid too long.

Just so that nobody mistakes me, I am not singling out the Tea Party here; in fact this is my only mention of it and I believe it to be composed mainly of sincere citizens who are angry about the economic circumstances of our present lives and the government excesses mentioned above. I don't have a problem with the Tea Party; I have a problem with extremists who circulate hate speech and who incite others to violence.

This, then, is Palin's crime, although as far as I know she broke no laws so it is a moral crime -- knowing full well how her target symbols would be received, she nonetheless launched a campaign to circulate them far and wide, raising lots of money in the process for her own political ambitions and inciting a group of people already worked-up to excessive proportions to entertain at least the thought of actual physical violence.

I will always staunchly defend her right to free speech, as well as yours and mine. And, by exercising that right today, I accuse her of a moral crime. Furthermore, I believe she would agree with me if she could bring herself to be honest. Why else would she have so rapidly removed her targets from public view? Out of common decency? It's a little too late for that. The damage has already been done -- not necessarily literally in yesterday's tragedy (who knows if the gunman even knew who Palin is), but to Palin's own reputation as a potential future leader.

She has a lot of work to do now if she is to recover. Those who continue to defend her should think a beat before blaming the so-called "liberal media," which is neither liberal nor at fault here. That is simply blaming the messenger.

No, in this case something else was at fault. That was Palin's message.

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