WHO STOLE THE SHEET MUSIC TO OUR DEMOCRACY?

I have a good friend who says "the best cure for democracy's current problems is more democracy." At first it sounds good, but listen closer and you can pick out the discordant notes in his melody. A discordance that is killing us in 4/4/ time...!

What my friend, an experienced lawyer, means is that our democracy operates as as a great bawdy orchestra of ideas and power. Clashing voter ideas and competing vested-interest power get a little messy, sure, but in the long run the performance comes out for the best. Something like the verdicts from an arguing jury. Well, at least that's how lawyers and the Founding Fathers want to hear our constitutional composition.

In reality, our 18th C democratic composition isn't playing all that well given our 21st C cacophony of off-key rival players. Democrats vs Republicans...rich vs poor...labor vs management...white vs others...warriors vs peaceniks ...big business vs anything in the way of big profits. When our democracy was smaller, these discordant notes eventually came together in a kind of successful coda. We survived our civil war, we conquered our continent, and we beat the bad guys in two world wars, didn't we?

However, the melody line of our democracy has grown ever more fractured. In each of those contentious times, we eventually found a conductor who could somehow help orchestrate the disparate parts into a smashingly successful conclusion. There was Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson and FDR at the podium wielding the baton. In our times -- just when the issues at home and abroad have grown exponentially more complex and dangerous -- the players are less willing to watch any baton!

Reagan, Clinton, Bush and now Obama -- each stands at the podium trying to conduct an orchestra in which the strings don't play with the horns, and the percussion section totally ignores the bass section.The explanation...? Well, after all this is a democracy in which solos are what count...!

With so many soloists insisting on their own sheet music -- each backed up with hundreds of millions of media and lobby and blogger support -- it sounds like there will never again be another maestro. My lawyer friend sniffs that would mean "repressing" the players' rights, and "stifling" the free flow of notes which constitute the essence of a democracy.

Look -- I applaud the principles of democracy with as much grateful self-interest as the next player. But it's the performance that frightens me lately. When every lobbyist or international corporation or powerful privateer can marshal hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate public opinion, stage calculated protests, and scream lie in the halls of Congress -- well, we have a problem Houston! And simply saying more democracy is the answer to the crisis is something like saying to a drowning man: "More water!"

EDWARD ALBEE & A DIFFERENT TERROR

I once asked Edward Albee how was it that he could write such a deep play ("A Delicate Balance") at such a relatively shallow age (35)? I thought his a profound kind of insight gifted only those few we call artists. His simplistic answer surprised me. "Well, as a kid I used to listen in to my parents' parties...."

I thought to myself, well yeah so did I, but whence this staggering wisdom in referring to "the terror" taking up residence in the lives of his play? Unlike today's terrors by terrorists, Albee was alluding to that nameless, faceless terror that inevitably and inexorably seeps into our very being. As life gets shorter and death gets closer. How wise of him -- of any of us young or old -- to candidly confront "the terror." Rather than simply try to drink, drug or delay it away as if it doesn't apply to me!

Americans are by history a pragmatic people. We like to see what we're dealing with, give it a name, find a solution. Preferably quickly. Say, like, buying a hot quarterback or firing a cold coach or blowing up the bad guys with shock-and-awe. What we don't like -- what we don't really understand -- are problems that are vague and open-ended and demand persistence. And so the "terror" of a global jihad war makes us as angry and impatient as we are fearful and unsure.

Albee's "terror," though, is vastly different.

It doesn't come in bombs or in rage. Rather, it comes in silence and in the night. When you're younger you can catch a brief whiff in your darkest hours of defeat. At the job, in your relationships, in your goals. But when you're older -- like those glass-clinking friends of Albee's parents -- "the terror" often arrives un-announced. Most often when you're alone, when you're studying your mirror, when you're burying your parents and your friends. There comes this tick. Not the ticking of a bomb-strapped on a jihadist, but of your own clock next to your own bed.

Time happens. No one gets more than 60 minutes an hour. But at the same time, no one gets less. So life is the gift that keeps giving just so long as you know how to spend it. Albee's parents and their friends were apparently spending it well at these over-heard parties. And yet, it took a 35-year-old artist to hear -- and to dramatize -- what even they may not yet have heard. The terror of ticking time.

I don't know what happened to those friends once they did...but I do know that a young Edward Albee went on to capture and tame that terror. For everyone -- young and old. rich or poor -- to see and study as it moved across the theatre stage. Makes you think -- maybe there should be a prominent place for attending the theatre in any future health plan...!

"OUR TOWN" -- A PRAYER AS WELL AS A PLAY

"Our Town" playwright Thornton Wilder once called his 1938 Broadway hit "a nice little play." The man under-valued himself. His later comments struck closer to the artistic truth. "The play is reminding us the ice cream is melting" and "we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures!"

When I was young, Emily's third act look-back from her grave struck my heart, but its sad wisdom never quite seeped into my head. Since then, time has happened...my parents have died...and my head has caught up to my heart. In those final 18 minutes of the play, Emily's brief return to life in her parent's kitchen transmutes from play to prayer. As she peers longingly at her parents -- busy with their daily trivia and unaware she is confronting them from beyond -- Emily at last realizes the enormously painful truth about this life: "We don't look at one another!"

Wilder becomes profound in saying here that only God -- and we only after we're gone -- have the perspective of seeing life as we live it. Otherwise -- and understandably -- we're simply living it. As if it will go on this way forever. In fact, aren't pragmatic Americans usually urged to "seize the day" and "live in the moment" for this all you have...?

Eric Erickson speaks of the stages of life as does Shakespeare, only with a psychological twist. While one of the early stages is his fight-or-flight, the last stage is integrate-or-despair. Once you've lived both, you can see each day and each moment as the unpolished pearl we usually forget it is. A raw jewel that calls not only for consciously burnishing it at the time, but then lovingly placing it alongside the rest in this necklace of memories we call life. And that we wear for such a short duration.

When Hollywood did the movie, of course it had to impose the appropriate happy-ending for the life-loving public. In Hollywood, Emily lives. But in the play she dies....and in the world we all die. Wilder's third act requires no confectionery editing anymore than does the brooding "Book of Lamentations" or the bleak records of Notre Dame and the Bears. The play duly reports life for what it is, death for what it is, and the opportunity we have to better fathom each, if only we take the time to do what Emily learns: To look at one another while we still can.

So what's the next pearl you're about to add to your necklace today....?

DARE TEST THE 1st AMENDMENT? DAMN RIGHT!

Now when would anyone dare test something so sacred as our 1st amendment...? Well, perhaps when it's being abused as often as it's being used. I dare to call to the witness chair (1) the media (2) the ACLU.

In the case of the media, a free press is without question essential to a democracy. But a carefree one? We could bring the New Media to the stand, for god knows bloggers tend to stretch the boundaries of truth and propriety at the click of a keypad. However, lets stick with the more responsible Old Media. In this morning's Chicago Tribune and New York Times the headlines raise alarms about "making Illinois the next Gitmo" and "one of the highest-profile, highest-security terrorism trials in history" to be set in the heart of the New York.

Our right to free speech has been tested by the courts many times, but lets take this Gitmo scare as a handy case in point. If indeed the Feds buy the Thomson Correction Center 150 miles west of Chicago, how fair and valid is it to stir the fears and passions of the citizenry, when this will mean little more than adding to an Illinois prison population already studded with dangerous and demonic criminals? It is entirely reasonable to expect a safe, secure transfer that warrants no more hysterical attention than when even more heinous murderers were locked up throughout our state's history.

Ahhh, but it makes good copy. Fear sells. And under the flag of free speech, every barbershop, beauty salon, cable channel and talk-radio station will bubble and babble for weeks. And for what? Come on, guys, it's sillier and less productive than Monday morning quarterbacking about something far beyond most of our expertise. So why not let the folks we elected do their job without the fury and frills of useless public rage?

Then there's the ACLU. A prince of 1st amendment applications, the ACLU can boast a proud history of public service. However, how many times have they been intoxicated with their own selective interpretation of the 1st amendment at the cost of the human hurt their court actions have impacted! Organized religion is of course one of their major concerns, but how often has their constitutional fury been unleashed without much concern for the emotional toll on the defendants?

For example, there is a federal park in the Southwest where a large cross has been planted in monumental memory to deceased World War I veterans. For generations, people here have held this to be a sacred memorial. Now, however, young tailored lawyers with no personal knowledge of World War I have swooped in to demand the federal government remove the cross. Why...? Well, of course, the operative explanation is their bristly interpretation of separation-of-church-and-state. When asked about the resulting separation of sacred memories from this cross, the lawyers I'm told had little to say.

Bottom line -- for every right there exists an obligation. To use it your right with a sense of justice and compassion for the other side. As it's been written: "My right to my fist ends where it meets your right to your nose!"

WHY DOES CORN POP OR HOW TO SOLVE OUR PRISON PROBLEM

We move in a world of many prisons. The prisons of our bodies and our minds, our dreams and our fears. And of course, a nationwide prison system in which 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated. This makes us the nation with the most citizens behind bars...!

If you're impressed by statistics, these will stagger you. When you include those on probation and parole, there are 7.4 million people in our criminal justice system. The inmate population alone has tripled over the last 25 years. With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of the world's prisoners. As the land of the free and home of the brave, the numbers are as troubling as they are tragic.

A specialist in the field, Professor Glenn Loury of Brown University, puts it this way: "The current American prison system is a leviathan unmatched in human history." When asked why we have so many prisoners, two answers kept recurring: (1) the tough-on-crime policies since the 1960s, 25% of which involve drug crimes (2) politicians at all levels of government who insist on these policies, but resist increasing prison budgets and reforms.

The politicians can point to statistics which show crime rates have dropped significantly since the 1960s, especially violent crimes. In New York alone, the rates plunged 40% between 1997 and 2007. And yet, in those same years, its incarceration rate dropped 15%, "proving crime and incarceration rates can actually drop in tandem." However, New York is the exception that proves the rule by which most states just keep locking more and more people up.

There is also a demographic factor. While blacks are 12% of the national population, they constitute 38% of the felony convictions. However, ghetto poverty rather than race is the chief explanation, with most of the crimes black-on-black. One result is, "poor black neighborhoods brutalized by crime and torn by the removal of loved ones to prison."

But while the statisticians understand the problem, the experts have failed to find the reforms to turn the situation around. It's not unlikely that when the conservative critics find the time, they will somehow lay the blame on our first black president.

In contrast to the blame-makers are the reform-makers. I'm thinking here of the black preacher who asked the question: What makes corn pop...? His explanation goes something like this. The kernel's outer shell is hard to change from the outside, but when properly heated, it expands from the inside. Which means breaking the shell and producing the happy results.

Being a man of God, he concludes this way: "Getting at people from the inside will always do more to make them pop than forcing them from the outside!" Have you noticed in your own life, how true that is...?

ARE WE GORE'S FRANKENSTEIN?

Al Gore has proudly predicted the Internet the next great leap for democracy. We remember how Dr Frankenstein once predicted his creature would be the next great leap for mankind. Making predictions is always dicey -- especially about the future....!

Now here I am using the Net presuming to analyze the Net. Takes guts, or is that gall! But then analyzing everything from apples to red zones is what Net users do. Which is precisely why we can always get a few hundred arguments about Gore's proud prediction.

As originally conceived, Athenian democracy was an assembly of citizens in open dialog....in 18th C New England it was the assembly of citizens in open town meetings....ever since the Constitution, democracy has been squeezed through the filter of a republic where our representatives speak for us. But if the Net has now permitted everyone everywhere to speak out on everything, has this energized or crippled our democracy? In other words it's the old old dilemma: Can we have too much of a good thing?

This has been the conundrum at the heart of our government even before the ink was dry in Philadelphia. Our government has had to wrestle with two companion but often conflicting principles: Equality and Liberty. If everyone has the liberty to be all they can be, very quickly we have the inequality of those who excel and those who can't. The few A-team players and all the rest of us!

Is that saying Dick Durbin and Barney Frank are better or wiser than Huffington or Salon,...? Maybe not, but what about Frankie the barber, Sally the stripper, Craig the the cop, and Harry the happy hacker...? I mean, now they and millions of other they's like you and me have equal access to millions of homes and heads out there which we can stuff with our own particular brand or babel of reality. Too much of a good thing? Too much of a bad thing? Or just too damn much for 300 million citizens to ever again rally around a few good men and causes?

Journalists have traditionally been trained for their work, and screened by their editors. Who s us? Who screens us? I'll tell you the options on the table: Our own sense of citizenship...our own sense of propriety.... our own sense of what's good and right and interesting. And all that does have a nice democratic ring to it.

Only...only it's the words "our own" that worries me.

WHAT DAD SAID - AT THE TOMB OF THE KNOWN SOLDIER

Every Veterans Day, as a young man I would wonder about having a conversation at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Now as an older man, I wonder about having a conversation at the tomb of my Father...

This is a solemn day which has, over its 90 years, grown much more forgetful. Millions of Americans served with courage, and hundreds of thousands died with honor. Here's what my Father might whisper to me in the autumnal hush of Hillside, Illinois:

"I came to Chicago from Sicily at the turn of the century. Too young when war broke out in 1917, too old when the next war came in 1941. But this was sacred soil to immigrants like me, so I had to leave Momma and you boys to volunteer. The Army needed motor pool experts like me, so what else could I do?

"I'm still surprised how few people remember these wars and these dead. And how they forget so many of us were immigrants just like the ones they seem to hate today. Blood is blood. All our blood -- Whites, Blacks, Latinos -- spilled for the same reasons. Not for the speeches or the politicians. For one another, and the people we left back home. Can you tell me why so many folks today think only: Me?

"A few years back these cemeteries were busy with people and flowers and flags. Today -- well, I guess people aren't any worse, just busier. Of course, they wouldn't have so much to be busy with if a lot of these crosses weren't here. Which is another thing I don't understand -- why do some people want to take the crosses down, and call that 'the constitutional thing to do?'

"Oh, there's something else -- the way everyone is so angry about government helping with health care and inoculations. I didn't live long enough to have things like Social Security and Medicare be in effect, but I sure wish I had. We all need a little help sometime...."

If by this point in my imaginary conversation I had a few tears in my eyes, it would not only be for Dad. More for all of us. On a day like this when you think about these cemeteries -- if you think about them at all -- you kinda have to wonder about us. Are we and what we're always so busy doing actually worth what they did for us?

I'd guess sometimes some of us are. But a lot of trivial, tacky times we're not. Which makes this day a remarkably apt time to put down whatever we think is so important. And -- just like the President laying the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier -- we might place one of our own at the tombs of all the soldiers, past and present, that we know.

Then, getting back to what was so important, we might have a much better idea how to define important.