Midlife Meditation

Entrusting the governance of a nation to democracy is like turning a horse loose in a hospital: the best result that can be hoped for is that no one was severely injured. Reading the Constitution, it's easy to see just how skeptical the founders were of this system they'd chosen for the fledgling United States of America. They were in agreement of the principle that power should reside in the people, but they were unsure how to channel that power into governing authorities. Looking back on history, they could see that classical experiments in democracy had been limited to city states, and none of them had lasted long. For democratic government on a national scale, they had only Britain to compare themselves to, and that system's reliance on a hereditary monarchy was the very thing they had rebelled against. They'd also had several years to experiment with a weak central government, and the results had been so chaotic as to mandate a major revision of the ne...

I don't know whether to be proud or aghast. There are many things I want to say about the Democratic Congresspersons "occupying" their own meeting chamber. This being an opinion essay, I'm going to reverse the "inverted pyramid" and start with the least important--which is, oddly enough, the issue that would be my acid test for a politician were I to be a single-issue voter: gun control. House Democrats staged this sit-in, disrupting the chamber's business and leading House Speaker Paul Ryan to take draconian, and futile, steps to stifle media coverage of the protest, in an effort to force a vote on the weakest gun control legislation yet to crash against the insurmountable reef of gun lobby influence: barring persons on the terrorist watch list from purchasing guns. Had this measure been in place, it would have done nothing to prevent any of the mass shootings that have proliferated since the Assault Weapons Ban expired. Should it ever see th...

Quiz time! Who said it: "...Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And ... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" Well? Do you know it? And don't you dare take your eyes away from this blog to Google it. That would be cheating. Anybody guess it was Bernie Sanders? Don't be too embarrassed if you did; after all, he's built his campaign around positions that many in the United States consider extreme: breaking up big banks, making health care and a public university degree into universal entitlements, and paying for it all with redistributive taxation. And he's not shy about using extreme rhetoric. Here's something he actually said:  "We need a political revolution of millions of people in this country who are prepared to say 'enough is enough'!" Anybody guess Donald Trump? He certainly has said some extreme things, all of them related to defending America: waterboarding, targeting the families of suspe...