All the health care rhetoric being put out by the current Republican leaders, about making health care work better and not putting the government between you and your doctor, is just a smokescreen designed to distract moderate voters from the grim truth: they don't care if poor people can get health care.If I were working for a 2012 Republican presidential aspirant, I’d be preparing now for this debate question: “Governor/Senator: Do you believe that the federal government should ensure that all Americans can buy an affordable health-insurance policy?”
It’s a tough question. If you answer “no” — well you are putting yourself pretty clearly on the wrong side of public opinion.
Americans may be divided on the Democrats’ recent health reform. . . but on the specific question I just asked, the American public expresses itself more than 70 percent in favor, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In a survey conducted during the George W. Bush years, The New York Times tested Americans’ generosity. What if helping the less advantaged increased the cost of your own health insurance? Forty-eight percent were still in favor of a government plan; only 38 percent said they were not. What if the plan added $500 to your tax bill? Forty-nine percent were in favor, 44 percent said “no,” with independents polling slightly higher in the direction of “yes.”
In other words, candidly shrugging off the uninsured will rub many voting Americans very much the wrong way. On the other hand, answering affirmatively carries other risks for a Republican.
Once you commit to covering everyone, you have taken a big step toward something that looks very like the plan Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts.
There are infinite possible variations on that program, but it gets kind of hard to avoid its basic shape: regulation to define what insurers must cover, a mandate on individuals to buy insurance, subsidies for those who cannot afford insurance. It’s hard to escape the Romney-care destination — a destination mistrusted and disliked by the Republican Party’s voting base.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
David Frum on the Politics of Health Care
Course Evaluations
I'm very glad he picked cheap books and that we actually used them as opposed to other teachers that require 200 dollar books that I never need to open during the entire semester.
Colonial Drawings of Mexican Archaeological Sites
It seems that Mexican and European scholars and artists who toured Mexico's pre-Conquest sites began making careful drawings of them in the 1600s, recording structures and features that have been destroyed, and details of surviving monuments that are no longer visible. The drawings above were made by Francisco Agüera y Bustamante in the mid 18th century. Many of these drawings are in archives scattered across Europe. Now Mexican archaeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan has embarked on a major project to collect copies of all these renderings, which sounds to me like a marvelous sort of research to be doing. I regularly point out that a huge amount of archaeological information is buried in the unpublished notes of past archaeologists, and in unexamined collections, so work like Lopez Lujan's is not only fascinating but quite important.
The Giant Tennesse Crayfish
You never know what you'll find under a rock:A new species of giant crayfish literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee, proving that large new species of animals can be found in highly populated and well-explored places, researchers said on Wednesday.The new crayfish should not have been easily overlooked, as it is huge -- twice the size of other species, the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Kentucky University said.
But the crustacean is also quite rare, they report in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
"This isn't a crayfish that someone would have picked up and just said, 'Oh, it's another crayfish,' and put it back," said University of Illinois aquatic biologist Chris Taylor, one of the researchers.
"You would have recognized it as something really, really different and you would have saved it," Taylor added in a statement.
Taylor and Guenter Schuster of Eastern Kentucky University found their first specimen of the new species under one of the biggest rocks in the deepest part of a commonly explored Tennessee creek.
The new species, called Barbicambarus simmonsi, is about 5 inches (12 cm) long and has antennae covered with a sensitive fringe of tiny, hair-like bristles, called setae.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
David Brooks, Amy Chua, and Teamwork
And it is certainly true both that most grown-ups work in groups, and that the really successful people in our society are not the best students but the ones most adept at manipulating other people. (Like all the dyslexic entrepreneurs Malcolm Gladwell wrote about, who got through school by talking other people into doing their work.)I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.
Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.
Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals. . . .
Since nobody can really do archaeology by himself, all my work is teamwork. And sometimes I engage in the sort of thing Brooks has in mind, sitting around a table and talking about solutions to problems. Much more often, though, teamwork in archaeology means each person is given a task to do that contributes to the whole: one person oversees the excavation, another analyzes the bones, one is assigned to compile a history of the property, and so on. My idea of teamwork was best put by a member of the Cleveland Quartet I heard interviewed on NPR; people, he said, are always asking him about the remarkable chemistry they have playing together, and he said, well, the most important thing is that all of us have learned our own parts really well before we sit down together for our first practice.
Obviously, interpersonal skills are vital to almost everything people do. If you can't form good relationships with other people you doomed either to unhappiness or to monkish solitude. If you can't motivate other people you cannot lead any enterprise.
But doing your own job still matters a lot. So I get queasy whenever I hear talk about teaching students how to function in groups by making all assignments group assignments, or giving group tests. In my experience a few people do all the work and the others ride their coattails. Perhaps this is an important lesson in itself, but I doubt the mission of the university is to teach slackers how to stay employed by being a smiling member of the team. We need to teach students how to do their own jobs.
Caligula's Tomb?
Italian police arrested a man trying to load an 8-foot (2.5-meter) tall marble statue into a van near Lake Nemi (above), which strikes me as the sort of thing that would only happen in a farcical movie, or else in Italy. The police identified the statue as Caligula, the mad emperor who ruled from 37 to 41 AD. The looter led them to the find spot, where excavations are to begin immediately; the police say they think the site is Caligula's tomb.The problem is that Suetonius says Caligula was buried in Rome, and since he was in utter disgrace at the time he is unlikely to have a gotten a grand tomb with 8-foot marble statues. So this find may be some sort of shrine or grotto associated with Caligula's nearby villa.
We will have to wait and see what the state archaeologists turn up.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Nietzsche and the Violent Young Men
If we never discovered that Jared Lee Loughner honed his murderous outlook while sitting alone in his bedroom, reading Nietzsche and thinking about nihilism, that would have been real news.Feeney goes on to explain why so many violent, alienated young men find Nietzsche appealing: his contempt for orthodox opinion, his dismissal of conventional sexual morality, his snide comments about women, his sense of himself as an ignored genius, and so on. But, as he notes, Nietzsche saw himself not as promoting of violent anarchy, but as offering the only possible way to avoid it:
One way of looking at Nietzsche's project is that he set out to teach himself and his readers to love the world in its imperfection and multiplicity, for itself. This is behind his assaults on religion, liberal idealism, and utilitarian systems of social organization. He saw these as different ways of effacing or annihilating the world as it is. It is behind his infamous doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence—in which he embraces the "most abysmal thought," that the given world, and not the idealizing stories we tell of it, is all there is, and he will affirm this reality even if it recurs eternally.Nietzsche's own comment on his murderous followers might have been, "Mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong."
Jared Loughner's despair that everything is unreal and words have no meaning amounts to hatred of the world (a mania of moralism and narcissism) for its failure to resemble the words we apply to it. Faced with a choice between real people and some stupid abstraction about words, themselves mere abstractions, Loughner killed the people to defend the abstraction. This, then, really is a kind of nihilism, only not the kind that people think Nietzsche was guilty of. It's the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche was trying to warn us about, and help us overcome.
Restoring a Map of New York
The Times has a nice article on a 1770 map of New York by British Lieutenant Bernard Ratzer, which the Brooklyn Museum discovered in its collection. It had lain unexamined for so long that they have no idea how they got it. The map was in terrible shape and had to be cut into strips before it could be unrolled, then extensively treated to remove a dark coat of varnish and other ills. But now, as you can see in this feature, it is revealed as an extraordinary work of eighteenth-century cartography.
Bog Bodies
Interesting news piece based on a new article about bog bodies:Hundreds of these bog bodies have been found over the past two centuries. But who were they and why were they dispatched to the great beyond in mucky swamps? The theories range from executed deserters to witches to everyday people.Ravn says that only a few bodies are tied down or bear other marks of special status, and he thinks most of the bodies look like a cross-section of the Iron Age population.
The Irish Countess of Moira back in 1783 launched scholarly explorations by suggesting that bog bodies were victims of Druid ceremonies. Others, citing the ancient Roman writer Tacitus, quickly saw them most likely as executed deserters. Arguments over individual finds have continued ever since the first look that year by the Countess at the Northern Ireland "Drumkeeragh" bog body, a woman dressed in wool clothes.
"Unfortunately the focus has been almost exclusively on the most spectacular finds, the mummified bodies," says archaeologist Moten Ravn of Denmark's Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, writing in the current Acta Archaeologica journal. Rather than arguing from just one body, Ravn suggests a survey of all the bodies might offer better clues to how they ended up buried in bogs.
There is nothing special about the range of 145 people in his survey, men, women, young and old.
Some were clearly placed in excavated holes lined with bark and cotton, buried with glass beads or gold jewelry in their mouths, a Roman custom. In Celtic myths, bogs and lakes were places of healing, Ravn suggests. "Is it possible that there was a wish to pass on these healing characteristics of the bog to a person who died a natural death so that the deceased could arrive healthy in the realm of the dead," he asks.Picture shows a reconstruction of the clothes found on one Iron Age body in Ireland. I think I saw that exact skirt on several women in England.Overall, bog bodies are "not so easy to explain," Ravn says. The oldest one, the Koelbjerg woman, dates to 10,000 years ago. Others date to modern times, such as Johann Spieker, a falconer who died in 1828. "The reason that people were given their final resting place in the bog was not because of any one single tradition or one single ritual," Ravn concludes. "Some were due to accidents and others to murder. Some may have been sacrificed and others may have died of natural causes and were buried in the bog."
It was recently pointed out to me that one interesting detail about Iron Age and Bronze Age bog bodies is that none of the men have beards -- except for Lindow Man, the one buried with a noose around his neck, which is another reason to think that he was a prisoner of some kind.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Cloning Mammoths
Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time.They plan to transplant a whole cell nucleus from a frozen mammoth into an elephant egg cell. This may not work, but if it doesn't, somebody else will succeed using DNA splicing technology. Those frozen mammoths contain all the DNA we could ever need, and mammoths and living elephants are probably closely enough related for cloning to work. My feeling about this is that it doesn't really matter if it a good idea or not, because somebody is going to do it, and from then on everything will depend on how life goes for the first few mammoths. If they thrive, we will have brought back the first of the thousands of species whose extinction we have caused, directly or indirectly. I think that would be a good thing.The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
Drug Decriminalization in Portugal
Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs — from marijuana to heroin — but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking . . . . As the sweeping reforms went into effect nine years ago, some in Portugal prepared themselves for the worst. They worried that the country would become a junkie nirvana, that many neighborhoods would soon resemble Casal Ventoso, and that tourists would come to Portugal for one reason only: to get high. “We promise sun, beaches, and any drug you like,” complained one fearful politician at the time.But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment . . . .
I think a 0.3 percent increase in the proportion of the population using drugs would be a price worth paying for ratcheting down the drug war and increasing the number of people in treatment.The numbers aren’t all positive. According to the latest report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the number of Portuguese aged 15 to 64 who have ever tried illegal drugs has climbed from 7.8 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2007....Heroin use jumped from 0.7 to 1.1 percent, and cocaine use nearly doubled — from 0.9 to 1.9 percent. In other words, said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, the changes in Portugal have had a somewhat expected outcome: More people are trying drugs. . . .
Hughes takes issue with Humphreys’s argument that drug use, in general, is increasing at a dramatic clip. What’s most relevant, she said, is not the percentage of people reporting using drugs at some point over some course of their lifetime, but the percentage of people reporting using drugs in the past year. “That’s going to be affecting the government and communities now,” she said. And here, the increase of Portuguese reporting illicit drug use is much smaller — up from 3.4 percent in 2001 to 3.7 in 2007.
Imagining China
If Americans wanted to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, he said, all we'd have to do is think of moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians. China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.
If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now. Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute. Seriously, reflect on this, and consider that it is China's reality now.
No Retirement
--Dr. Thomas Mutter, 1811-1859
Eodromaeus
The Cubicle
I promised pictures of my cubicle once I had fully moved in, and here they are. I just finished decorating this morning, listening to mandatory corporate ethics lectures.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Pretty Music
Vienna Teng, "Blue Caravan." I just discovered her yesterday. Of course my goth daughter already knew her, especially her "My Medea."
Drunken Celts and the Archaeology of Iron Age Beer
bases that conclusion on a close resemblance of the ancient grains to barley malt that he made by reproducing several methods that Iron Age folk might have used. He also compared the ancient grains to malt produced in modern facilities. Upon confirming the presence of malt at the Celtic site, Stika reconstructed malt-making techniques there to determine how they must have affected beer taste. . . .That detail about flavoring with henbane is intriguing, since henbane is a powerful psychoactive drug, regularly mentioned as one of the ingredients in Renaissance witch's salves. One Elizabethan herbalist wrote:At the Celtic site, barley was soaked in the specially constructed ditches until it sprouted, Stika proposes. Grains were then dried by lighting fires at the ends of the ditches, giving the malt a smoky taste and a darkened color. Lactic acid bacteria stimulated by slow drying of soaked grains, a well-known phenomenon, added sourness to the brew.
Unlike modern beers that are flavored with flowers of the hop plant, the Eberdingen-Hochdorf brew probably contained spices such as mugwort, carrot seeds or henbane, in Stika’s opinion. Beer makers are known to have used these additives by medieval times. Excavations at the Celtic site have yielded a few seeds of henbane, a plant that also makes beer more intoxicating.
The leaves, the seeds and the juice, when taken internally cause an unquiet sleep, like unto the sleep of drunkenness, which continueth long and is deadly to the patient.Another:
If it be used either in sallet or in pottage, then doth it bring frenzie, and whoso useth more than four leaves shall be in danger to sleepe without waking.This may perhaps explain the extreme behavior of drunken Celts, as noted by Greek and Roman historians.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Revolution in Tunisia
It is a moment of great promise. A thuggish and corrupt regime has been overthrown by a mostly peaceful protest movement. Tunisia has one of the best educated populations in the Arab world, and close ties to France. People are saying that there is a chance for real democracy.
On the other hand the main grievance of the mostly young protesters was the lack of jobs, and free elections won't do anything to help with that. Tunisians may have won their freedom at last; but building decent lives remains a long and hard struggle.
More on Amy Chua and "Extreme Parenting"
It’s hard to accept that by bringing a child into the world we’re creating a hostage to fortune. Amy Chua’s child-rearing manifesto . . . presumes that we can prevent our kids from hurt, harm and disappointment. It’s a fantasy of control and protection.Second and more interesting is this review of her book. It seems that the WSJ excerpted the most inflammatory section, as you would expect. But there is more to the story:
Born to Chinese parents who were raised in the Philippines and attended MIT, Ms. Chua, 48, graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law, where she was an executive editor of the Law Review. She confesses in her book that she is “not good at enjoying life,” and that she wasn’t naturally curious or skeptical like other law students. “I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.”She told an interviewer that her first draft included a lot about the parenting conflicts between her and her more laid-back husband, but he never thought she was getting his side right, so she decided to leave most of it out.
She was determined to raise her daughters the way she and her three sisters had been raised — which, she said, left them adoring their parents. By her account, her elder daughter, Sophia, complied, excelled and played piano at Carnegie Hall. But the younger, Lulu, rebelled. At the turning point of the memoir, Lulu, then 13, begins smashing glasses in a Moscow restaurant and yelling at her mother, “I HATE my life, I HATE you.”
Friday, January 14, 2011
Ai Weiwei in the Rubble
Of his own studio, demolished by Chinese authorities. Amy Davidson commented that Weiwei's art "takes many forms, including what he considers the performance art of his quixotically confrontational dance with the Chinese government."
War on Meth Not Achieving Much
In 2006, I worked for the subcommittee in the House of Representatives that was the principal oversight body of the federal drug war. We were the ones responsible for the Combat Meth Act (inserted in the renewal of the Patriot Act), which federalized the restrictions on pseudoephedrine sales.
The thinking was that there seemed to be a real chance of truly ending meth production and consumption - a rare, total victory in the war. The precursor chemicals needed to make meth were produced only in Germany, India and China, and if those exports could be reliably controlled, restrictions on pseudoephedrine sales here could mean the end of the meth problem entirely. Apparently, the precursor chemicals are still finding their way to Mexico and the U.S.
Undoubtedly, the new law led to a noticeable decline of local "mom-n-pop" meth labs - dangerous productions sites that produced five pounds of toxic waste for every pound of meth. As usual, emotion was a big part of the arguments for it, with stories and pictures of redneck mobile homes or motel rooms polluted with chemicals, and men in biohazard suits carrying out children and hosing them down.
But, as with everything done in the drug war, we were just squeezing the balloon. That same year, we were in Mexico City and met extensively with government officials regarding the meth problem. At that time, they firmly denied that any meth was being produced there, much less exported to the U.S. Today, of course, all must admit that meth has now become a significant product of the Mexican cartels, and thus a driver of the horrible violence south of the border. Not only that, the "crystal meth" they send north is much more potent than what was normally produced locally.
In the end, we squeezed domestic production, and thereby created a tremendous opportunity for the cartels that they are ruthlessly exploiting.
Opposition to the drug war does not indicate a cavalier attitude to the destructive power of addictive substances (like, you know, alcohol). It is simply an honest recognition that there are limits to what big government can achieve, as well a recognition that the costs of prohibition far outweigh its alleged benefits.
People want drugs. Our moral outrage at the wreckage they cause is not a sufficient reason to criminalize their use. Alcohol prohibition taught us that. We should legalize (or at least, decriminalize, as Portugal has done with great success) and regulate production, and pour into rehab all the money we save by no longer caging casual users.
The Lament for Cynddylan
there burns no fire, no bed is made.
I weep a while, and then fall silent.
Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight
No fire is lit, no candle burns.
Except for God, who will keep me sane?
Cynddylan’s hall: it pierces me
To see it roofless, fireless.
My lord is dead, but I am alive.
Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight,
without a fire, without songs.
Tears wear away the cheeks.
Cynddylan’s hall is desolate tonight,
Where once I sat in honor.
Gone are the men who held it, gone the women.
Cynddylan’s hall: its roof is dark
since the English brought down
Cynddylan and his gold-torc’d men.
Welsh poem, perhaps dating to the 8th century. It describes the death of Cynddlan, king of a British realm centered on Wroxeter, who fell fighting against the Saxons around AD 656.
The Warren Cup
The Warren Cup was kept in the British Museum basement for decades because it was "too shocking" to display in public. Found in Syria or Palestine and made within a few decades of AD 1, it depicts scenes of homosexual sex. By ancient standards it is not particularly graphic, but the subject was just too horrid for the tastes of the mid 20th century. Not any more, though, and the cup is being loaned to the University of Notthingham to go on display as part of an exhibit about Roman sexuality.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
EPA Blocks New Mountaintop Coal Mine
As originally proposed, this would have been the biggest coal mine in American history, so this is no small project. "Mountaintop removal" coal mining depends on dumping the waste into surrounding valleys, obliterating the stream headwaters and replacing them with heaps of rock that leach acid into streams further downhill. If this is illegal under the Clean Water Act, that will be a huge blow to coal mining in West Virginia.The Environmental Protection Agency has dealt a death blow to a proposed plan to dump strip mining waste in West Virginia, making what could prove to be a landmark move against mountaintop removal coal mining. Agency officials said Thursday that has revoked a Clean Water Act permit for the controversial Spruce No. 1 coal mine, a focal point for years in the battle between environmentalists and the coal industry. The agency concluded that allowing the mine's owners to dump waste into a nearby waterway would cause "irreversible damage" to water and the environment in the surrounding region.
"The proposed Spruce No. 1 Mine would use destructive and unsustainable mining practices that jeopardize the health of Appalachian communities and clean water on which they depend," EPA's assistant administrator for water, Peter Silva, said in a statement. The agency said that, after more than a year of discussions with Mingo-Logan Coal Company, the company "failed to produce an agreement that would lead to a significant decrease in impacts to the environment and Appalachian communities."
How to Act Presidential
Their actions, their selflessness, also pose a challenge to each of us. It raises the question of what, beyond the prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward. How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?
You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations – to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health systems. Much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.
But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.
Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “when I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.
So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.
But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together. . . .
I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here – they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.
