In 1925, Martin Buber was asked to address the Third International Education Conference whose subject was “The Development of the Creative Powers of the Child.” What the organizers of the conference failed to anticipate was the response of an authentic deep thinker to the assumptions intimated by this preassigned subject. He began his lecture with a refutation of its title: he said “of the nine words (in the title) . . . only the last three raise no question for me.” The alleged capability identified as the “creative powers of the child” he felt was not properly designated. Further, the concept of “developing” this alleged creative ability in the child might risk misdirecting an individual away from his/her natural instincts, in effect destroying what was original in the very child to be educated. Today, I feel, we still struggle with what we mean by education itself. There are perhaps as many definitions of education as there are respective roles in our education system. Obviously, there are the teachers in our schools. They seem to know what they are doing. But they conduct their profession in a public school system that is governed by administrators, regulated by political appointees/legislators, and influenced by the expectations of parents. These non-teacher entities are the representative public. But do they know which teachers to support and what best practices to be replicated? This representative public hires teachers, buys textbooks, provides resources like computers and teaching aids, often determines curriculum, and manages overall behavioral standards for the classroom environment. Like Buber nearly a century ago, I question whether this “public” has properly designated what it means by “education.”

What Buber had to say 90 years ago still has relevance today and can be further extended to our very concept of education. Let’s start with Buber’s assessment. Are children born with unique creative ability? Well, they are born unique with many undeveloped potentials. We can all agree with that assertion. But creativity is an actual attribute, not a potential. When my pre-school daughter scribbled on her bedroom wall, I did not recognize artistic genius—just my baby playing with crayons. The capability she demonstrated was not creativity but the power of an originator. She, like all children, discover very quickly that they are subjects in a world of objects: playthings and the various forms in their environment are presented ready-made to be destroyed, moved, changed or tossed aside. Generally, we see our children at play and admire their spontaneity, curiosity, and ingenuity in the way they tear apart or put together whatever forms they find before them. A teacher, however, presents them with the specific forms of a curriculum. He/she attempts to harness their innate capability to effect change in their environment by focusing their attention on course material and the manner in which it can be manipulated to achieve objectives. Great teachers seem to know instinctively how to attract the child’s curiosity to the subject matter to be taught and how to guide them through the steps to acquire knowledge and, yes, the ability to use what they have learned to create for themselves and to relate to the world in which they were born. Sometimes we assume that the young student is a tabula rasa (an empty slate) that the teacher must fill up with knowledge and test like a computer program that returns only what has been stuffed into its code. The problem with this assumption is that it replaces development with compulsion—a kind of force-feeding—which can only lead to boredom, rebellion, or learned idiocy. (In a fundamentalist environment, it leads to a blind acceptance of principles that subvert the individual to the dictates of others.) The teacher is the developer who shows the way and guides the students along the path to becoming creators and producers in the world they will inherit. What Buber had to say about the misnomers of his time can be extended to ours. For example, what do we mean by “education?” The word comes from the Latin ex, “out of,” and ducere, “to lead,” and denotes a specific quality of leadership. The teacher does not just lead by example or by authority, but mainly by teasing out of the students not only interest in a subject, but the discipline to learn and apply it in their individual lives. A tuned violin still cannot play itself. But the curious student can be led by an astute teacher to develop the skills he/she has learned in the classroom to make a better version of the self and a more productive member of society. This learning bears no resemblance to achievements in standardized tests. The later provide a statistical framework for evaluating our public school system in a very generic way. But they are not nearly as useful in judging the individual student’s assimilation of subject matter into his/her life. The teacher is in a better position to make this kind of judgment because the teacher is the educator, the activating principle in the student’s learning, the Pied Piper luring young students forward. The teacher is not the tyrant who commands or the demagogue who incites, but the learned practitioner of the art of persuasion and the trusted guide into the realms of knowledge and, potentially, wisdom.

Let’s move beyond definitions to specific concerns with our public school system, beginning with the role of curriculum in education. The subject of curriculum is a complicated subject because it encompasses many moving parts: objectives, scope, continuity/integration, and appropriate gradation through age levels. There are places in the world where curriculum is solely determined by politics or religious predilections. Here in America, curriculum is sometimes influenced by the same factions, though generally not controlled by them. For example, there are states where teachers are told to teach creationism as part of a science curriculum. Another example is the fact that many textbooks have little to say about the role of women and minorities in America’s history. Perhaps a more generic influence from the political sector is the exclusive emphasis on math and science. The result has been a progressive decline in funding for the humanities—history, literature, art, music, and philosophy. This emphasis comes from a politically magnified “public” perception of the importance science and technology play in the growth of America’s economy. But political perception is not a solid basis for building a curriculum and not conducive to education per se. The ability for young minds to develop critical thinking, to become self-reflective, to learn from the past, to not only articulate original concepts, but to create them comes from a curriculum balanced by the humanities. My voice is not alone in making this observation. Teachers seem to understand it. But our contemporary public school system seems oblivious, partly due to economic and political pressures and equally as a result of losing its way. Somehow, school district administrators have become more engrossed with other areas such as test scores as a measure of student and teacher performance, with physical infrastructure in the form of facilities and resources, or with public image that mirrors whatever conventional wisdom rules the day. The educator in the classroom, as a result, may have less to say about what is taught in the classroom than the politician, the administrator, or naïve public opinion. In the state where I live 40% of the education budget is allocated to school district administration; and my state ranks in the bottom 10% of student performance across the United States. Teachers and curriculum are managed by a top-heavy bureaucracy that is controlled by non-educative forces, the so-called “representative public.” If this bureaucracy continues to define compulsory education, then the emphasis will be more on “compulsory” than on “education.”

I remember talking to a high school math teacher about his frustrations with many of his students. In spite of all the support he received from the school district, his students did not see the relevance of advanced math classes to their lives. He often cajoled them about the future job market and their limited prospects without a strong foundation in math. Their response, according to him, was apathy based upon a conviction that they already had all they needed in terms of wheels (many had cars), sexual relations, and even an occasional “high.” They had no need of advanced math skills. Unfortunately, even in their myopic adolescent context, they were inadvertently right. Though advanced math skills may help them get a job as a particular type of programmer or engineer, it would not help them live a better life unless those skills were wedded to a greater sense of purpose and self-worth. My point here is that jobs do not define who we are. Instead, we either define our jobs and the relationships that come with them, or are doomed to hollow careers. These students had no broader view of life’s prospects. Instinctively, their resistance to learning math was a blind admission that there must be more to life than a better paying job. They just had no way of identifying that life. Their teacher also had no way of integrating what math had to offer with a broader curriculum that included a perspective traditionally proffered by the humanities. For example, math is not just about manipulating numbers but a way of identifying and calculating numerical relationships that both enable us to engineer change and enhance our perspective of the world. The harmony of the cosmos has both a numerological component and philosophic/poetic/inspirational agency. These students were not prepared to see math in the context of beauty or purpose or personal meaning. The fault here does not lie with the teacher or his students, for it was the system that failed them both.

Finally, a public education system has to be a form of community. All elements of that system—parents, administrators, politicians/legislators, and teachers—need to work together. The head of this phalanx is the teacher, for the primary relationship is between the teacher and the student. But the other members of this community have an important support role. Parents, for example, want to support their children’s education. But they tend to air their frustrations with administrators rather than in constructive dialogue with their children’s teachers. Administrators can play the role of diplomats, but they cannot replace the teacher in explaining relationships in the classroom. They may be quite ineffective in this context; and parents are likely to be frustrated in their desire to support the education of their children. Teachers can also be frustrated, because they too often lack the influence they need to develop/reform educational policies. They turn to their unions to advocate not only for them but for their students. But the unions should only be representing teachers before the school districts. Misapplication of their role in respect to students only adds a political dimension and a confrontational aspect to the constructive relationships that are required within this educational community. Politicians/legislators are also part of this community and have an obligation to manage and fund school districts. But they have little or no competence in defining curriculum or evaluating what happens in a specific classroom. Their management is at the level of overall system performance. The tools they have for evaluating performance are generic and need to be tempered by school district assessments. And it is at this pivotal administration level where this education community seems most in jeopardy. All elements of the community speak to school principals and district managers/appointees. Their job is integral to communication within this community, but not to actual teaching in the classroom. They can effectively assist the teacher in many ways, with constructive performance reviews, with training, with classroom resources, with student behavioral issues, with effective monitoring of parent/teacher meetings, and with honest representation of actual teaching requirements in funding requests. But they cannot function in any of these capacities if they are not clear on the meaning of education and the primacy of the relationship between the teacher and the student. School administration can become a bloated bureaucracy, a black hole of communication, and a political apparatchik that serves no interest other than its own preservation. Wherever this prognosis may be valid, there is no effective education community and little if any support for the teacher in the classroom and ultimately for student achievements in our public school system.

Children are both the beneficiaries of our education system and the victims of its shortfalls. We, their forebears, naturally want to leave our children better prepared than we were to live a fulfilling life. Human progress demands as much. But, currently, our public education system is in decline. Parents are frustrated with it. Politics and bureaucracy obfuscate its purpose and befuddle reform. Teachers are blamed rather than empowered. And students are less inspired than handicapped by unbalanced and unintegrated curriculums. This level of dysfunction is the status quo only when “education” is not education.

Our system of two major political parties has produced much contention and a surprising amount of weirdness. The former is obvious from our history; the latter might be just my peculiar obsession. Let me first elaborate on what I mean: what is or is not the weirdness that seems to bother me.

You would not expect a donkey to crush you with its front hoofs or an elephant to kick you with its rear legs. Yet both the Republican and Democratic parties switch their attack modes indiscriminately. In sync with these switches are reversals in strongly held ideological positions and traditional policy positions. There are so many examples of these inconsistencies that it is hard to envision how anybody can cling to party loyalty for more than one election cycle. Here are a few samples that make my point:
• A Democratic President ordered the only use of nuclear weapons in war (Truman); and a second Democratic President threatened their use in defense of a territorial protectorate dating back to the Monroe Doctrine (Kennedy).
• The Republican President who spoke most eloquently against entitlements strongly supported “a welfare system structured not to trap the poor in dependency but to enable them to escape poverty” (Nixon). That same President, an avowed anti-communist, opened relationships with communist China.
• Two Republican Presidents in succession raised taxes in order to forestall impending debt crises (Reagan and Bush 41).
• A Democratic President eliminated the barrier between traditional and investment banking (the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act) which put individual deposits at risk in the market for financial securities like derivatives and, in great part, enabled the Great Recession of contemporary times (Clinton). The same President sponsored reform of the welfare system to reduce long term dependency and promote re-employment education and job placement services.
• A Republican President proposed a plan that would have reformed the nation’s immigration policies and granted a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants (Bush 43). That same President sponsored a huge expansion of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and deficit spending.
• A Democratic President, with a Democratic majority in both houses of the legislature, was able to advance a healthcare program based upon the Republican proposition of mandated private insurance for everyone (Obama).
So what can we construe from this short list of paradoxes? Democrats are not always wisps on foreign policy, anathema to business interests, and sublimely socialist on domestic issues. Republicans, on the other hand, are not the only war mongers and staunch supporters of reduced taxation, of limited government, of mindless or insensitive constriction in entitlements, and of immigration reform that both curtails and deports illegals. Given the actual track record of the Parties, what can be said about the relevance of ideology and consistency in party politics? Perhaps not much! And maybe not weird either.

We are accustomed to politicians changing positions. Sometimes the opportunism behind these changes is so apparent as to be ridiculous and the welcome gist of satire. But they are tolerated as “politics as usual,” and not considered weird. And I would agree—though with some stipulation. Presidents in particular should not be wedded to a party-line because they are elected to serve all parties in the electorate. For the most part, I believe we elect people as much for their character as for their policy positions. In other words, we trust them and entrust our government to their honesty and wisdom. For example, in 2008 we elected a “progressive” who promised to change the divisive atmosphere in Washington among his many campaign promises. His first attempt to create bipartisan support for his progressive agenda was health care reform based upon a decades old Republican proposal already enacted in Massachusetts. The Republicans were irate for he had stolen their only stake in the game. The Democrats were disappointed their President did not put forth a new government program along the lines of “Medicare for all.” He even killed the so-called “public option.” But, at the time, the President commandeered his party with a 70% approval rating and apparently large coattails. Besides, Congressional Democrats seemed to enjoy rubbing their majority in the face of Republican opposition. But in fact they found it difficult to embrace the President’s healthcare reform as evidenced by their unwillingness to defend it in the mid-term elections. The Democrats won a Pyrrhic victory: they passed healthcare reform, but on the basis of a private insurance market that they genetically detested. Republicans lost the battle at the hands of their own sword and, in the process, lost the opportunity to defuse new regulatory restrictions on that private market. Neither party got what they wanted out of the healthcare debate. But the American people got Obamacare with all its benefits and regulatory baggage. So what is so weird about a new program that neither party fully supported? Well, nothing really! The party of Lincoln, remember, was not wholly enthused with the civil rights legislature of the 60s, and the Democrats who passed it lost the Southern portion of their party for generations.

Democracy is messy. Change comes from elections, but not wholly formed. Debates in Congress will push and pull new proposals into almost unrecognizable forms. When passed by majorities in both Houses and signed by the President, new programs may be established but may still not be in final form. Civil rights laws from the 1960’s are still being amended in legislatures and clarified in courts. Medicare has seen more than a few modifications over time. Voting rights, housing discrimination, free trade treaties, tax law, and so many other policies will continue to be refined and debated. Democracies and their governance will always be—and must be—in flux. Parties change sides. Liberal prescriptions for change become conservative positions in another era, and vice versa. And Presidents can be out of sync with party ideology, especially when they respond to their perception of the general welfare. So what is the weirdness I find in American politics today?

The determinant factor in a democracy has to be the will of the people. When our elected officials do not respond to the public will, weirdness has entered into our democratic reality. Whether its gun laws, immigration reform, tax law inequities, campaign finance reform or a host of other issues, there seems to be a disconnect between the electorate and elected officials. The latter seem more intent on serving minority interest and campaign funding sources than the American voters (reference “The Clash of Minorities”). Strict party line voting is another type of weirdness in our democracy. About two thirds of the electorate tends to vote for the same party in every election without regard to changes in platform. Perhaps voters are not paying attention to changing party positions. Perhaps they simply are not listening to the issues being debated or are only paying attention to the arguments with which they already agree. Democracy is messy and in constant flux. If we pay no attention to that flux, then we become responsible for the ensuing chaos. As we enter the season of Presidential politics, we will see politicians taking positions without substance (“Obamacare is a job killer”) and saying things that boggle the mind (“self-deportation” or “jihadists will kill us all”). Politicians may do whatever they think will get them attention and possibly elected. We, as the keepers of our democracy, must be attentive to all sides of an issue and vote our best judgment. It is not the political voices we hear, but the internal voice of reasoned reflection and conscience that can eliminate the weirdness of American politics.

Democracy boasts many freedoms. But individual freedom comes at a price. That price is accountability. Blind party loyalty suspends individual accountability—and therefore freedom—to a collective. The virtual public forum where all sides of an issue can be weighed is in each of our minds. Disregard the abstract nonsense about the “destruction of our way of life” or the promise to “make America great again.” Listen carefully to both sides of a real issue—like immigration or tax reform—and imagine yourself on the other side of your chosen position. Only when you can understand an opposing view will you be in a position to make an informed judgment and vote your conscience. You will then be in that public forum where democracies live and evolve. You will also help free me from my obsession with the weirdness of American politics.

There is “nothing to fear but fear itself,” President Roosevelt told an anxious citizenry. The fear he referenced was based upon the reality of Pearl Harbor and of enemy subs firing shells at the West Coast (a few fell harmlessly on vacant farmlands). Those events seemed like harbingers of a full scale invasion and a realistic basis for widespread fear and its corollary, a gut response. One columnist in California proclaimed that he hated all Japanese, including those born in this country. But Roosevelt was trying to exercise leadership by quelling an over reactive mass hysteria and, at the same time, focusing the nation on the task at hand—which was building the armaments and resources needed for full scale war. The nation was facing a real existential threat that required a massive mobilization effort. Decades later on 9-11 America suffered another attack upon its homeland. Although on this occasion the nation was not facing an existential threat, President Bush recognized that he would need support both from the American people and from Congress in order to exact justice on the culprits. That support was readily given in the polls and in legislative action. But, other than garnering support, he never required anything else from the American people. When he extended his war powers to include Iraq, his Administration used the age old political tool of inciting fear. Remember the “evidence” that Hussein was plotting with terrorists and harboring nuclear weapons or the image of a mushroom cloud hanging over an American city. The politics of fear are not just of recent vintage: state leaders and politicians have used fear to manipulate a susceptible public throughout history. But the use of fear in this manner—to obtain war authority—is not leadership, for it asks nothing of its followers other than the license to wage war in their name. We were never asked to do more than watch “shock and awe” on television and vow support for our troops. Machiavelli once said that “a prince must have no other object and no other thought than war and its methods and conduct . . .” The use of fear is one of those methods, assuring the desired public reaction of acquiescence to the prince’s power to wage war. But Machiavelli was a despot. Persuasion was merely part of his arsenal to disarm naysayers so that he might exercise state power freely. His type of leadership should have no influence in a free, democratic society. President Bush may have commanded a volunteer army that represented half of one percent of the U. S. population, but he never persuaded the American people to do anything other than blindly acquiesce to the invasion of Iraq. In a democracy, however, we would expect debate on matters of war and peace and a public persuaded to some form of common action. You may think this analysis is too harsh. But ask yourself whether Americans would have supported our recent wars if a war tax had been suggested or if a selective service system had been proposed for reinstatement. President Roosevelt in effect did both, raised revenue and called Americans to arms. President Bush only asked for a license to do whatever his Administration decided. His initial cause was just; his intent may have been pure; but his sole rallying cry was based on fear. That fear was indeed something to fear in itself, for it blinded Americans to reality and to the war’s false justification.

Since World War II, America has engaged in many military conflicts around the world. Those conflicts have changed history, but too often not in favor of our objectives. Witness North Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, and now Syria, to name a few. My thesis today is simply that we have allowed the definition of “existential threat” to be inflated well beyond its meaning and have fallen victim to the politics of fear. I am not advocating disengagement from world affairs, but for more honesty from our leaders and much more participation by the American public. Given all the military engagements of the intervening decades, how many Americans have even reflected on the fact that we have not had to defend our nation from a foreign state since World War II? We have instead interjected our military in civil wars where the ultimate outcome had little likelihood of being determined by America. Our troops were put in harm’s way to assuage our fears of radical ideologies like communism or extreme jihadism, wayward dictators who posed no threat to America, and the unproven existence of WMDs in a country without the means to deliver them. And yet, since World War II, the only effective use of our military power against an actual existential threat was as a deterrent in the Cuban missile crisis. President Kennedy’s deft use of that deterrent averted World War III. He also gave substance to President Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy mantra, “speak softly but carry a big stick.” The emphasis here is on “carry.” Currently, America has the biggest stick and the most effective deterrent to any existential threat since the Roman Empire. In addition, we also have significant financial, cultural, and diplomatic capabilities with which to influence the world community. Our use of military power to defend ourselves has never been questioned. But any deviant exercise of that power runs the risk of undermining our global influence and betraying the trust of the American public. Amongst other core values outlined in the preamble to our Constitution, the United States of America was formed to “provide for the common defense.” This country has no colonies, no empire, and no fiefdoms to protect. But we will defend our nation and by extension our allies, because we exist for ourselves foremost and as a beacon of freedom for the world. As an enlightened nation, we should never permit our leaders to govern by fear. Our founding fathers outlined for us a path forward that called for public debate and consensus. These prescriptions demand reasoned decision making from our representatives, not manipulative fear mongering. Too many times of late, we have been flummoxed by the politics of fear, rather than honest judgment.

In America we are at the beginning of an extended electoral campaign. This is the season where the politics of fear will pour into every media catch basin and overflow into the fertile unconscious of all of us. Already presidential candidates have stated that “jihadists will kill us all,” presumably unless we kill them first, that Russia will retake its empire and threaten America with its nuclear arsenal, that China’s rise will hold America’s debt in the balance as it extends its power over all of Asia, that immigrants from our southern border will infringe our freedoms and steal benefits and resources from law-abiding Americans. According to the fear brokers, we need strong leaders who will deploy our troops in Syria and Iraq, bolster Ukraine with high-powered armaments and U. S. military advisors, sail warships into the South China Sea, and buffer our southern borders with even greater military force and drones. Certainly, there are real global issues that America faces in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia, and our own Western Hemisphere. But the only existential threat America faces at this time is from within. Gridlock and partisanship in Washington has stymied effective governance. Growing financial inequality threatens the fabric of society where not only income but wealth, education, and opportunity are relegated to an ever-decreasing privileged. The nation’s outstanding productivity is squandered with trillions of dollars spent on foreign wars while our infrastructure withers from lack of investment and our inner cities become conclaves of poverty where only neglect and desperate crime prosper. And perhaps the biggest existential threat is a pliable citizenry duped by the politics of fear.

The politics of fear may be a proven way to win over an electorate, but it treads a dangerous path towards governance. For fear suborns judgment. Remember “the only thing to fear is fear itself.”

My first night on guard duty in a combat zone was met with a typical Vietnam welcome: a bullet whizzing by my head. In an instant I dropped to my knees and surveyed the area before my guard tower. My heart was beating loud and fast; and every sense was heightened in intensity. If I had seen a single bush move, I would have instantly turned my M60 in that direction and sprayed it with gunfire. But all was calm before me. A month later, I found myself actually facing moving bushes, but they were not swaying in a soft breeze. They were slowly moving in my direction, likely sappers leading the way for an all-out attack. Since I was alone, my position was in danger of being over-powered. Fortunately, I was able to call for support. A gunship rescued me that night. But even with the gunship’s hell fire raining down on the enemy, I felt compelled to empty my magazine into the fray. In neither situation did I act on my best moral assessment of the situation. I did what any soldier was trained to do AND what nature’s instinct compelled.

When I wrote “A Culpable Innocence,” I tried to capture what my fellow Vietnam veterans experienced in that war. Their experience is not different in kind from what police experience in like situations, though on a different scale. When an officer is faced with a hostile environment—real or potential—he or she will instantly feel a heightened intensity and propensity to act. What will determine the course of his or her action? My experience—and the experience of any soldier who has faced combat—would predict a response dependent upon an instantaneous state of mind and prior training. Adrenaline is usually the most significant influence on that state of mind and it tends to track with the extent of the perceived threat. But it does not have to be incited by a gun pointed in your direction. It might be just a walk in a neighborhood where past crimes have been committed. In this case, the “moving bush” is in the head. An officer who feels threatened can be just as ready to use deadly force as an officer approaching an armed suspect. In the latter case, the risk of an escalation is heightened. If deadly force is triggered and other officers are present, they may be drawn into the fray without aforethought. This type of escalation can act like an adrenaline avalanche where the combined response of multiple officers far exceeds the threat, mirroring the effect of a combat operation more than a civil police action. Although officers are not soldiers in combat, they are subject to the same visceral reactions.

So what can we do about the situation of officers using deadly force inappropriately? Many suggestions are being considered. For example, we could provide body cams to our officers. But this solution may not be a very good preventive remedy, since we are most likely dealing with the spontaneous, unpremeditated use of deadly force. (And, frankly, if an officer had premeditated murder on the mind, he or she would simply turn off the camera.) Body cams have their greatest value after-the-fact, enabling investigation and possible punishment. They may not be very effective deterrents. Another course of action might be the use of sanction. We could severely punish officers who use deadly force inappropriately. But would that be a deterrent to any officer caught in the moment of immediate peril, perceived or real? I think not; for that moment demands reaction, not reflection. Also, that reaction may more readily turn violent, if the officer has suffered stress recently in either personal or professional life. When I served in Vietnam, I witnessed more than a few soldiers so traumatized by firefights or shell shocked by night bombardments that they had become walking hair-triggers. The accumulation of high stress experiences or even a single violent incident can take any person to that hair-trigger edge. Perhaps we can learn from the soldier’s experience in combat zones.

One of the remedies currently being discussed and implemented in many parts of the country is what is called “community policing.” I remember the account of an Iraqi veteran who reported no casualties in his unit or in the civilian population where they were imbedded during his tour. He said his unit had daily contact with civilians, not only engaging with them in conversation but working with them in their communities. The Iraqis accepted these soldiers not as an occupied army, but as protectors from the more violent elements of an ongoing civil war. The replacement unit that followed took a different tack, alienating themselves from the civilian community. Their experience was markedly different, engaging in regular combat with insurgents and suffering several casualties. So connecting with communities can be effective. This form of policing needs to be part of police training. In addition, police academies should qualify candidates for acceptance based upon those relational characteristics required for community policing. Since the draft was terminated, the military has strengthened to some degree its admittance criteria. Just as not anybody in the general population can become a good soldier, not any individual who wants to wear a police uniform should. Our police force demands a special type of individual, level-headed and dedicated to public safety. We also need to take better care of our on-duty officers. We do not want traumatized or stressed-out police walking our streets, especially where crime is prevalent. The military, for instance, used to recognize the need to relieve soldiers in combat zones with periodic R & R (rest and recuperation). Any officer who has been engaged in a shoot-out or any stressful situation either on or off the job should be allowed recuperation time, perhaps paid leave or reassignment to some community-involved tasks. We definitely do not want a hair-trigger officer patrolling our streets. And, finally, we need to deal more effectively with the incidence of biased policing. Eliminating preconceptions and bias in the police force is no different than eliminating it in the general population. Naturally, police training should address the issue of racial profiling. Just like everybody else, police need to examine their prejudices and assess the effect on their professional conduct. I have written about this subject matter in a number of blogs (reference “Racial Bias: A Conceit or Merely a Context,” “The More Subtle Relevance of George Zimmerman,” “Telltale Biases,” and “Soulfulness”). Each generation seems to extend the moral boundaries towards greater inclusiveness, regardless of race, gender, sexual preferences, and body types. This spirit of inclusiveness would be helped if police recruitment better represented the community served. But, regardless, police officers will still reflect the cultural biases of the general population.

Throughout this nation there are millions of daily interactions between police and civilians. I suspect nearly all of those interactions service public safety. As much as we decry the misuse of excessive police force, we need to recognize what service these men and women provide to the general public. And we need to assure their care and training is up to the dangerous task we set for them. Since we seem unable to muster the majority needed to disarm criminals, we arm and train police to use deadly force when they or others are threatened with the same. In a sense, we have put them in the same sort of danger as our military. But they are the servants of public order and peace, not soldiers on a beat.

What makes America so special? And how has it become the oldest democracy in history? Seen from beyond its border, it is readily identifiable as a country of great diversity. Its heritage may be born of Europeans fleeing less inviting circumstances, but its population and culture have evolved with the influx of immigrants from every corner of the globe. In addition, the combination of our public school system, diverse employment opportunities, interstate mobility, and advanced education institutions has made for a robust economy that breeds productivity gains even during blips in our GDP. For many around the world, America is still seen as both a melting pot and the “land of opportunity.” But for those who chose not to live here and see America from afar, we also appear to be a land of great chaos: we are armed to the teeth and kill each other at alarming rates for a developed country; our politics swing wildly between extremes of the left and right over issues like civil rights, gun control, or abortion; and we tend to conduct foreign policy like evangelists converting the world to our principles of free enterprise and democracy without regard for other cultures or history. We may indeed be a melting pot. But, if so, we are constantly brewing, bubbling, and even boiling over. The rest of the world both admires our ingenuity and enthusiasm and is wary of our ambition and excesses.

Seen from within its borders, our apparent chaos is just the working out of our nation’s founding principles. One of the wonders of America, besides the goals expressed in our Constitution, is the system of government founded on that text. The checks and balances prescribed therein give voice to every segment of the population—from congressional districts and states of all sizes to the general populace vote for the presidency as represented in the Electoral College. And that founding document has also given us an independent judiciary to settle our disputes, interpret the application of law, and arbitrate justice for all. However wonderful this system of government may be—Churchill seemed to think it was the best amongst the dregs of human history—it appears to rest upon a few assumptions about human nature. Two of those assumptions are my subject matter today. First, as John Adams so clearly identified, our system of government depends upon an informed electorate. Second, although it is designed to give voice to minorities, it presumes that the majority’s decisions will rule. In other words, if we self-govern the way our founding fathers intended, we would be constantly engaged in informed debate where all affected parties are heard and where resolution of the debate is decided by a majority vote. The pot may be brewing, but it needs to be deliberately stirred into a peaceful mixture, where the hard lumps are melted down into a balanced suspension. Our history has witnessed various minorities—ethnic, racial, LGBT, and women’s groups—who have helped to stir the pot and have demanded change that the majority deliberated and eventually voted into law.

The problem we are currently facing is a contemporary anomaly: there is no informed majority participating in the decision making process of our democracy. Whether through apathy or ignorance, the majority seems to have left the public forum to the special interests and issue driven concerns of minorities. Lobbyists of different special interests fight for their respective minorities’ causes or positions. Far right or far left minority groups petition and win not only the legislature’s agenda, but its concurrence on issues the majority would never support. Do the majority of Americans really support the closing of clinics dedicated to women’s health, the lack of universal background checks for the purchase of firearms, the manipulation of voting districts so that a national party can control the legislature without winning a majority of the votes (referring to the Republicans now, but equally to the Democrats previously), the evolution of a tax structure that favors the wealth accumulation of a minority over the wage earning majority, the imposition by a specific minority of religious rights over civil rights where both religious and civil freedoms of the majority may be violated, and the fire-breathing, outspoken minority who consistently preach a foreign policy governed by military options rather than diplomatic engagement? The question I am posing is not whether you agree or disagree with the various positions I just enumerated. I am highlighting the fact that there appears to be a majority of opinion on all of these issues that seems unaccounted in the decision making process. Most of us would like to see our roads and bridges repaired where needed, our future social security funds protected, a fairer tax system, affordable higher education for our children, an electoral system more dependent on our vote than the amount of campaign money raised, and (yes) affordable AND effective healthcare for our families. Even when these universally popular concepts are voiced by our politicians, they are immediately overwhelmed by the issues of well-organized minorities. Our governance is no longer in our hands, even though we are the majority. And yet our Constitution clearly gives us the power to govern ourselves. All we need to do is be informed and vote. So who do we blame for the apparent dysfunction in Washington?

At both the State and Federal level, too much legislative priority is given to minority issues—most often well-funded special interests—at the expense of the general welfare. How does a florist issue with servicing a gay wedding or a single woman’s decision to seek an abortion or the political statement of a faux “repeal” vote of established law deserve more priority than the high cost of college education, the growing student debt crisis, a decaying infrastructure, tax law inequities that both negate fair business competition and middle class wealth creation, the excesses of campaign fund raising, and so many other concerns that affect the majority of American families. If we want our vote to count more than the almighty dollar, then we have to wield the power we already have. Otherwise, the serious issues of our time remain unaddressed while we become mere spectators to the clash of minorities.

In September, 2013, I wrote a piece titled “Subtlety versus Bombast” in which I accused both Republican and Democratic parties of so polluting the political discourse “that it is almost impossible to sift out any factual analysis.” The subject of their contentious discourse was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often referred to as the “Affordable Care Act” (ACA), or, mostly disparagingly, as Obamacare. The Republicans claimed that the ACA would cost one trillion dollars over the span of 10 years. The Democrats countered with their argument that the ACA would save the government one trillion dollars over the same period. Both parties quoted the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to prove their point. After reading the CBO report, I realized that both parties were quoting out of context while distorting the CBO’s actual conclusion: the ACA would result in a net savings to the Federal Government in its first 10 years of implementation with the promise of a positive impact on the nation’s GDP in the following 10 years. In addition, the CBO estimated that there might be as much as half a trillion dollars in non-coverage savings which it did not include in its analysis. The latter savings would depend upon future action by the health care industry and Congress.

Subsequently, in April of 2014, I wrote another blog titled “What Follows Obamacare?” in which I proposed that Congress should “(1) first, assure these non-coverage savings are realized and (2) relook at the structure of our health care delivery system to identify cost effective reforms that Congress might incentivize the health care industry to initiate.” In that blog I delineated what health care insiders had already suggested: what actions the health care industry might undertake and what incentives Congress might provide. Now, five years after the ACA became law, we have some preliminary evidence of the law’s effect:
• Healthcare spending as a percent of GDP has stopped increasing, remaining flat at 17%; and its rate of growth is the lowest in decades at 3.9% per year.
• Since 2011 annual spending per Medicare beneficiary has fallen from $12,000 to $11,200 and is expected to stay at that level through 2020, resulting in an expected annual savings of $160 billion and a further extension of Medicare’s financial ledger balance beyond the eight years projected in 2009.
• Hospital productivity has accelerated as a result of adapting to the new healthcare law which penalizes hospitals for readmissions, discourages the profit making associated with buying and depreciating the latest expensive equipment with minimal consideration of need or effectiveness, and makes attractive the recent surge in hospital mergers which furthers team medicine, best practices, a salaried medical team devoted more to outcome than quantity of services, and, as a result of economies of scale, supports the digitizing of patient medical records for their dissemination to medical teams working in concert to provide better individual patient care.
• Consumers of health care services have benefited in many ways, to include subsidized premiums, competitive pricing of insurance policies, provision of more preventive care, extension of coverage care to students living at home, elimination of insurance companies’ denial of care for various reasons such as pre-existing conditions, and so on.

Specific provisions of the ACA have not only implemented regulatory restrictions beneficial to health care consumers but have also expanded the insurance market, enriching insurance companies with billions in new revenue. Meanwhile the health care industry has become one of the fastest growing segments of the US economy, spending billions in response to the impetus the ACA has given to improve health care in America. But, in spite of these early milestones, America still spends nearly twice as much as other Western democracies on health care (France being an exception, where health care consumes 12% of GDP). The obvious conclusion is that the ACA has been a success, but that more needs to be done. So what is missing in this limited success story?

The missing element is a willingness of legislatures both in some Republican dominated states and in Washington to build on ACA’s success. While the law’s expansion of Medicaid has had a positive impact on the unemployed and working poor, there are still some Republican dominated states that have refused to accept Federal money to fund this expansion, creating a new victim class of uninsured who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid and not enough to pay for partially subsidized insurance premiums. The Republican House of Representatives, meanwhile, has passed legislation to repeal ACA over fifty times. They have threatened to shut down the government and have risked America’s financial stability by refusing to extend the debt ceiling. In spite of these backward-looking phenomena, approximately 16.4 million people have obtained insurance through the ACA exchanges, surpassing the most optimistic expectation of 15 million enrollees. So why have some legislatures, including Congress, taken such a negative position?

I believe the Republican Party has painted itself into a corner. All the negative ads, straw-man criticism, and exotic hyperbole (e.g. death panels, job killer, deficit busting, government meddling in the doctor-patient relationship, and so on) have created an insurmountable obstacle to overcome. The Party’s only response seems to be a doubling down on the rhetoric and continued obstructionist behavior. Is it possible for any politician in America—Republican or Democrat—to admit a mistake or, at least, to adjust constructively to the majority position on any policy that they initially opposed? Apparently, the answer to that question is “no”; for the appearance of being wrong or on the losing side of a policy debate cannot be born in our public forum. Public posture is rated much higher than public policy.

The unbelievable irony of this ACA debate is that it took a Democratic president to initiate and pass a Republican policy. It was Ted Kennedy that convinced President Obama that the Democratic position of a universal state sponsored health care program could never be implemented. Kennedy had come to recognize his mistake in turning down the proposal of a mandated private insurance program run through state exchanges offered by the Republican Senate Majority leader, Bob Dole. President Obama has said that the Republican proposal, initially constructed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, was the least disruptive intervention in the health care structure already established in this country. He never believed that it was the ideal construct. His decision to support it was the very model of pragmatism and compromise that our system of government demands. Republicans could have rejoiced in their victory over the Democratic “big government” solution to American health care provisioning. The Republican proposal was not only more practical, but it emphasized personal responsibility (the mandate), private enterprise (expansion of the private insurance economic sector), and market forces to control price and performance (competitive exchanges). To what purpose have Republicans snatched defeat from the jaws of success? Apparently, their emphasis is on winning at the polls and in the next election rather than in governing. In that pursuit they have been largely successful. Democrats have been cowed into not defending a law they would never have constructed without Presidential leadership. (Witness their reluctance to defend the ACA in the last two mid-term elections.) And “Obamacare” has become a negative acronym in the public domain.

Having stated all of the above, I want to be clear about the future of ACA. There are problems ahead for we are leaning into an unknown and somewhat unpredictable future. We have already witnessed a few blips in the implementation of the President’s new law: the initial rollout of healthcare.gov, the President’s too generalized statement that “if you like your policy, you can keep it,” the law’s inconsistent wording of participant’s eligibility for subsidies through state vs. Federal exchanges, and, of course, the Supreme Court’s ruling that allows states to refuse Federal funds that expand Medicaid. In November, 2013, I wrote a blog that addressed the President’s misstatement (“ACA: Affordable or Not?”). But in that article I concluded “We are at the beginning of a sea-change in America’s health care provisioning system. It’s going to take years to fully stabilize and hone this system, much as it did with Medicare.” I still believe in that conclusion.

Pascal in his Pensées once said that to write about politics “was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum.” Now there are two aspects to this statement. First, there is the laying down of rules. This task befell our founding fathers during the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. They were fully cognizant of Aristotle’s words, “every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good” (the opening line to Book One, Politics). In the Preamble of the Constitution they laid out what good they hoped to achieve: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union . . .” What follows the Preamble were the rules by which they hoped to structure and organize the new United States of America. Emmanuel Kant, though not a political philosopher, believed that reasonably intelligent people would establish universal laws and “a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions” (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals). Echoing the second part of Pascal’s statement, he concluded that “the problem of organizing a state . . . can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.”

Generally, I would refrain from characterizing my fellow Americans as lunatics or devils, but our current legislators do give me some misgivings about their intelligence. As I write this blog, they are unable to agree on a bill that would fund the Homeland Security Department. The “good” the majority party is trying to obtain is the defunding of the President’s administration of immigration policies. The irony, of course, is that they would be defunding border patrol agents, the very people assigned to control illegal immigration. In the process they would be severely limiting the effectiveness of a department responsible for the safety of all Americans. Is there a logic here that any intelligent person can identify for the rest of us? I doubt that the founding fathers ever intended to grant Congress funding authority so that they could shut down the government they vow to serve or any key part thereof designed to preserve it from harm. While the majority party accuses the President of overstepping his Constitutional authority, it clearly is trashing several of the primary goals stated in the Constitution’s Preamble, specifically, to “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare . . .” Even if you believe the President exceeded his authority by prioritizing deportations—as several Presidents before him have done—his Constitutional authority to do so is already before the courts and will be adjudicated in accordance with the rules set down in our Constitution. With respect to the Republicans in the House, their current action defies the very purpose of the Constitution.

Elsewhere I have written about the failure of our leaders to compromise (ref. “Compromise: An Unfulfilled Promise”), but this new standoff is something different. It is an abdication of Constitutional responsibility. Further, it replaces statecraft with criminal-like blackmail. Remember who the victim is here: “We the people . . .”