WHAT HURTS TO REMEMBER IS CONVENIENT TO FORGET

What it hurts to remember becomes easy to forget. For instance, some of those kids sitting in your high school class who got better grades, because they were smarter than you....!

The memory may be unpleasant, but it can be instructive. Especially in a democracy where we are repeatedly but counter-intuitively advised that everyone is equal. That everyone's vote counts. That everyone should have a voice. But what they don't advise is what we should all recall -- not everyone of us was as good as the kids with the As or the high-jumps or at the prom. Look, school reunion time is coming around, so it might be a good time to take stock of what we mean by "being equal."

Since high school we've learned that some of us are actually more equal than others. In business, sports, marriage, parenting. Well, the same has to be assumed for our role as citizens. A democracy depends strongly -- even desperately -- upon the best informed efforts of its citizens. And yet every new school year features new reports about how many citizens have no idea where Europe is, what we mean by the three branches of government, who's running in the election we're being urged to vote in.

With democracy, a nation tends to go no further than its citizenry is willing to take it. And yet we watch health-care debate degenerate into mis-informed shout fests, we witness rage in traffic jams and on highways, we see election after election in which we vote into office the most astonishingly inappropriate candidates. Here, let me help make the point. In a recent survey by Prince & Associates, a whopping two-thirds of respondents with incomes of $30,000 to $60,000 (the national median) said they would marry an average-looking person they "liked but did not love" if their potential mate was worth more than $1.5 million! Interesting, hmmm?

But, then, we don't need surveys to remember how Miss Cutler and Mr Jenkins were always telling the loafers in the back seats to "pay attention or you'll never amount to anything!" Turns out that Culter and Jenkins were half right. A lot of us loafers haven't amounted to much in this world. And yet, in the noble name of democracy, we have become the ones whose votes are running it!

Sorry, but I still believe our teachers had it right, and I'm going to tell them so next month. You gotta do your homework. Especially in a democracy. So don't give me this inspiring but delusional everyone-is-just-as-good-as-everyone-else. For us Italians -- less is never more...!