"Why am I made to feel like a pipsqueak moralist for simply trying to hold my country to the nonsense I was taught as a child in the 1970s about democracy, equality, honesty and compassion?"

Inquiring minds want to know: who does this to you, and on what topic? Go grab a fresh Mike's Hard and tell us EVERYTHING, you mean old tease.

I admit to vagueness. That's why I called it a note-to-self.

But I'll give you the example that has probably inspired the "note to self," made me feel like some kind of dumb-ass, boring, good-government, reformer chump.

I'm talking to lots of Illinois politicians lately for a story I'm working on. (For those of you in Illinois, you don't need to read further. You already know what I'm talking about.)

I'm discovering that:

A. There are essentially no laws about how politicians in this state can get their campaign money, and from whom. So they get it from people and companies, all well-heeled who benefit directly.

B. There are essentially no laws about how they can spend it, so they can throw it around like Frank Sinatra if they like.

C. If you mention the word "ethics" in any conversation with almost any Illinois politician, it's met with a chuckle.

D. Reporters don't report on this stuff clearly enough, voters don't read about it carefully enough.

E. I keep having to repeat to myself: I am NOT a naive moron. It is NOT okay for politicians and their contributors to sit in back rooms of fancy restaurants and shape our whole landscape. This is NOT how it's always been and how it will always be. Etcetera.

This is only one example; there are more, which involve schools in the inner city as good as schools in the suburbs, and universal health care, and the insane costs of higher education and cancer patients being allowed to smoke grass.

But to be honest, I'm feeling a little too depressed to go on. (Let alone on AND on.)

Oh. That. Yes, we live in a slimy world that grows slimier by the day. Even here in North Dakota, where the total population of the STATE is only 600-some-thousand, politicians sit in back rooms and do their evil.

And let's move out of the realm of politics: your little Scout will grow up in a world saturated to bursting with perverse sexuality, intentional cruelty, and self-interest.

Those like us have to act as missionaries. Missionaries don't always die agonizing deaths, but they never have easy lives.... Hell, now you've got ME depressed. (Must go make me a Stoli blueberry martini.)

I don't want to be a missionary. I want to be a heedless, confounding writer with loose morals, ripping reformers for their hypocrisy and "stirring up the animals," as H.L. Mencken did so gloriously in his day. I hate where all this is taking me. And I hate that I feel TAKEN somewhere, rather than driving there with the hammer down.

Anyway, Jane, thanks for your interest in--and apparent empathy for--my machinations of late.

Rereading and rethinking this blog item and my exchange with Jane, it occurs to me that this entire entry might be summed up with one sentence:

"I'm getting older."

The lesson here: Don't post your notes.

I thought that as you got older you got more jaded about corruption and the system, and more likely to accept it because you can't change it.

So perhaps you are getting younger?

First, I HATE HATE HATE that I can't access anything with "blog" in the address at work betwen 9-5, so I'm always late into great conversations like this that happen here, until I can get home and onto my own computer.

Now then, David, you are not...let me repeat-NOT to allow "them" to convince you that you are "getting old" "over-reacting" "making mountains out of molehills" "people don't care/can't understand" or that "this is just how things are nowadays" This is the kool-aid those people in the back rooms want you to swallow. DO NOT GIVE UP!

I know there are many other Americans who are just as disgusted, angry about these sorts of things as you are. I am also convinced that many are intelligent enough about what the great country you live in (and in spite of everything going on there recently I still believe the capability for greatness remains) was founded, and meant to be.

Write your article, using every bit of information and every example of of heinous behaviour you have in those legal pads. Those of us still paying attention want to know, and if you show people why "this" is bad (ahem-strategic communications) they may get mad enough to act. You know, like a certain tea party I've heard about?

However,in order to properly fortify yourself, I agree with Jane - More Mike's Hard!!

Cheers!

It's definitely worth fighting over, even if nothing changes. It's the whole "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." At least the guy went down screaming, right?

It's a depressing world, there's not getting around it, but the redemption is found in reading a book to a child, picking blueberries today in the Oregon mountains (Jane, I have just what you're looking for in a Stoli martini) and relationships. These are the undeniable moments when you realize the beauty cannot be squashed, no matter how hard we tried. These are moments that will never be found through politics, however, I'm afraid. And there's the rub.

It's definitely worth fighting over, even if nothing changes. It's the whole "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." At least the guy went down screaming, right?

It's a depressing world, there's not getting around it, but the redemption is found in reading a book to a child, picking blueberries today in the Oregon mountains (Jane, I have just what you're looking for in a Stoli martini) and relationships. These are the undeniable moments when you realize the beauty cannot be squashed, no matter how hard we tried. These are moments that will never be found through politics, however, I'm afraid. And there's the rub.

Eileen - how sweetly and simply you express the important things, and remind us why we get angry and fight for things that are precious. Thanks for the reminder and for your wonderful way of saying things!

I ain't giving up, Kristen. Just trying to square my world with my self and find my honest and proper political stance, politics being an area where I've never been particularly wise (Eileen, I'm a relationships guy myself; as my mother said, "I can listen to a marriage autopsy for hours"), but which I keep being drawn back to, often against my will.

How many times have I sworn off writing political stories because they're not worth the work and because I'm not particularly efficient at it ... and how many times have I gone back?

(Answer: About a dozen.)

David,

Your post reminded me of a quote that goes something like, "Those who respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made."

My opinion is that the U.S. political system is meant to be participatory, and most of us opt out. That leaves the system to people who are motivated to participate either out of altruism or greed. Greed usually wins out.

Until large numbers of us "ordinary citizens" start attending local council meetings, school board meetings, legislative sessions and subcommittee meetings, we will continue to let some decisions be made for the good of the few.

Are you ready to leave behind your Mike's Hard Lemonade and sit in some additional meetings? Or would you, like me, rather spend the time watching your kid hit a baseball?

My local American Legion concession stand serves a mean sausage--and I don't ask how it's made.

Tom, you're right on. In the last election, the guy I'm profiling—writing is part of my participation in the system—ran unopposed. Not 4,000 votes were cast out of a population of 75,000.

I do attend neighborhood meetings on issues I care about, and I believe the city of Chicago is more participatory than the suburbs--the journalists are more courageous and numerous and there are more citizen groups to add dissent.

I think most Americans are making a fundamentally stupid deal with politicians and corporations working hand-in-glove to rule the land: Give me cheap stuff and make me free to move about the country, and I'll give you everything else, including the future.

Reading books like Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals", any of the David McCullough historical biographies, and the like, always leaves me amazed by two things: 1) That politics then is AMAZINGLY like politics today, and 2) somehow we still manage to move forward into a better country, a better society. The finagling and back-room dealing to get "successful" politicians into office happened just the same back in the days of Franklin and Adams.

We romanticize those days because we grow up with stories (emphasis on "stories") about chopping down cherry trees and being truthful, and the figures that have arisen out of history, like Washington and Lincoln, who have become synonymous with certain virtues and values and ethical victories.

But we forget that in their time, many of them were not generally viewed with great favor. It wasn't until later in history that the true results and measure of their accomplishments were judged "great."

Most people were just as uninvolved in politics throughout our history as now, though today we have fewer excuses. That's because then, as now, most people are focusing on reading books to their children, picking blueberries in the Oregon mountains, finding the perfect recipe for their drink, earning the money to pay the bills, clothe and feed the family, pay for education, etc.

This is not a reason to feel small or get depressed, but an opportunity to realize how big you can be by doing your part to keep people as informed as they wish to be and to advance the causes you believe in so that one day people will look back on "history" and see progress.
michael clendenin

Michael, I've read enough history to know that politicians and pious saints have never gone together. Abe Lincoln was a hell of an operator, and he did it right here in sleazy Illiniois.

I guess what I don't share is your uniform optimism about the "better country, better society." I'm aware of many of the advances we have made, of course. It's just that I don't think of them all that often.

Perhaps because I'm a journalist, perhaps because I'm the son of a crotchety WW II vet, perhaps because I'm the son of a manic-depressive mother, perhaps because I'm simply correct (always an outside chance of that!), I focus on:

• the insanely widening gap between rich and poor
• the fact that we're the only civilized country without a universal health care system
• the wretched schools in our inner cities and the excuses we make for not improving them
• the fact that we're in a monumentally clumsy war that we're mostly sending our poor people to fight
• the sweatheart deals politicians make with the corporations that line their pockets, and the outsized control corporations now have over much of our lives (and the media that would criticize them)

In any case, I'd be a happier guy if I saw the country as a steadily improving situation; I just don't happen to see it that way.

Please give me a similar list of happy trends, to cheer me up.

This all reminds me of something I just taught the students in my "Intro to PR" class. People are basically complacent and self-centered. For people (publics) to become activist requires an issue that affects them and the belief that they are empowered to do something about it. I think it's kind of cool that we communicators -- whether journalists or public-relations counselors -- have the ability to make people aware of issues, show them how the issues affect them, and help them see how empowered they are to do something about the issues.

I don't see Michael's insight as being idealistic or oversimplified. I believe he has helped us put it all into good perspective. He's right when he says that those old historical dudes didn't see themselves as making a whole lot of progress in their day, either. It's easy to look back and see how revolutionary they were. At the time, however, most of them felt frustrated by the lack of progress being made.

David, David, David. Help me help you. Help meee....help youuu!
Happy trends over history:
End of slavery and eventual voting and civil rights for women and minorities

Truth and objectivity in journalism from the days of purely political papers in 1700s and 1800s to bloggers exposing truth

Look at the size of the middle class proportionately to 100-200 years ago.

Most universal health care systems suck in terms of quality of medical care, so the U.S. is slow to get there, but my bet is we'll do it better than anyone.

We're fighting a clumsy war, but we're fighting and we're sending proportionately less of our poor today than in our wars throughout history. Talk about the poor doing the fighting. And the soldiers are proud of what they're doing and they're getting much better pay and benefits for it now than historically. Think the Civil War vets got college education for the asking?

It's all in perspective. More to the point, it's all in what you want to do with it. Moan that it ain't what you want it to be, or get excited about what you can do to get us closer to that.

I'm trying, buddy!

Michael--

I'm feeling better already.

David

I live to serve.

Wait a minute, Michael--

I was joking. The gains you mention mostly happened more than a century ago, and you don't mention backslides in between (Joe Kennedy's son was killed in World War II, and my steel-company exec-son Dad fought in the same war, as did everybody else).

And I'm supposed to be comforted by your "bet" that we'll create a universal health care system? (And what's your deadline on that: Another century from now?)

Seriously, I did expect better, and I probably could have done better my own pessimistic self. Now I'm really in the dumper.

I know you were joking, David. Believe it or not, I heard the sarcasm in those four little words. And all I've got for ya is a little sarcasm back. "I live to serve."

I mean, seriously, you're laying out a position you really don't want to be moved from, so there's no real point in debating it and getting sucked into a liberal-conservative thing.

I'll be honest, I'm more disgusted with both parties' tendency to try to deny any win at all by the other side. So the Dems have a great piece of legislation, and the GOP figures they should have thought of it first, well, crap let's block it until we're in power and then do something like it and call it our win. And vice versa. Hell, if we'd never gone into Iraq, we'd still be fighting Al Quaida in a dozen other places and the administration would have been criticized for not doing enough against Al Quaida or Hussein. "Junior did just like Dad and left Hussein alive."

Despite that, I choose to believe that eventually we get some things right and that which we get wrong gets changed. And if I really believe strongly in going one direction or another I vote for the candidate who represents the direction I think we ought to go. And if there isn't an election anytime soon, I write my representatives and tell what I think we ought to be doing. Does it change things because I wrote that letter? Probably not, but I did something. And I live in a country where I have that privilege.

You want optimism? I can't give that to you, buddy. Like Smokey said, "Only you."

Michael, I do appreciate your thoughtfulness here, and in this post you haven't said a thing I disagree with. Your scenario about us not attacking Iraq and the administration still being under fire is plausible. At any rate, thanks for the conversation.

As for doing my part: Today I actually got thrown out of the office of the politician I'm profiling. You really feel you've done something when .....

Thank you for the conversation, my friend! And please don't take anything I say above as combative as it might seem. I hold you and this forum you've created in high regard and a great example of what a blog should be -- primarily focused on a subject and targeted to an audience but loose enough to allow limited tangential discussion and certainly stamped with the author's personality. This, as opposed to the purposeless meandering rants that others post to what are essentially vanity channels for their authors.

I read your original post here as a temporary nadir of spirit as you pursue your writing caused by the dispiriting nature of the subject (politics). No doubt about it -- look at politics in the short- or even near-term and it can be damned depressing and seem like a cesspool in which any search for hope and promise is futile at best. But you wouldn't have gotten to that nadir had you not had the interest and determination and some kernel of dedication to the process in the first place that, taken together with all the others out there who share the interest and determination and dedication, ensure that the process does have positive results in the long-term.

So chin up. Forge ahead, write what you see as truth as opposed to what the politician wants you to see as truth. Know that we're all behind your effort regardless of our personal beliefs and positions.

And I want a copy of your finished story!
michael clendenin

Thanks very, very much for these kind words, Michael. They mean a lot. I've had so much fun with this blog in the few months I've been doing it, I can't tell you.

And yes, as soon as the story comes out--this fall, I hope--I'll share it with everyone.

You know, I've found a very easy and effective way to use my blog as a note-taking device.

It's called a "draft."