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The starting premise of this newsletter is something that we all know in our bones: that public life in the United States today is an absolute mess. 

And not just an annoying, disappointing, inconvenient mess, but a terrifying one—a mess that threatens a future, for the United States and for the world, of increasing violence, poverty, natural disasters, tyranny, and gross injustice. 

And by “public life” I mean our politics, of course, but also our economy, our media, and in some respects our culture. 

It’s a mess that we, the citizens of this country, have made ourselves, through ignorance, laziness, inattention, selfishness, and hubris, not to mention widespread gullibility, our seeming eagerness to be conned.  We have ourselves to blame.  That is, after all, what democracy means. 

It follows that cleaning up the mess—creating for succeeding generations the safety, comfort, freedom, and justice that many of us grew up assuming was an American birthright—is our responsibility, collectively and individually. 

This nation never was, really, a shining city on a hill: ask anyone with skin darker than mine. But since colonial times Americans cultivated the dream, or myth, of ours as a uniquely free society, and we struggled to realize that dream, to expand freedom. Our history is punctuated by those expansions: Independence and the Constitution, of course, plus the Bill of Rights, emancipation, Reconstruction and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, women’s suffrage, the whole panoply of legislation and court decisions during the Civil Rights era, and the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, just to name a few. Throw in the defeat of Hitler, and the election of the first black president. And whether or not we entirely deserved it, America was—literally for centuries—an inspiration for much of the rest of the world about the possibilities of democracy, personal liberty, justice, rule of law, and opportunity. Until now. Almost overnight we seem to be tossing that dream onto a trash heap.

Democracy only works when the majority of citizens behave like grown-ups, respect the truth, and revere justice. 

All of this is, of course, easier said than done.  This newsletter, then, is my attempt, as a simple citizen, to understand what has gone wrong and to speculate on how we might fix it.  It is me reacting to my reading, exploring our history, trying to see clearly, trying to peel away dangerous layers of myth. 

These aren’t trivial matters, and I admit my presumptuousness in tackling them in public.  I’m not a journalist, historian, political scientist, philosopher, or academic of any kind.  I’m just a guy: an American citizen, in my 60s, white, fairly well educated and reasonably well-read, and retired from a white-collar job (actually from three distinct careers).  And I’m preoccupied, to put it mildly, by the specter of my country and my world heading off a cliff. 

Mine is not, I admit, the obvious background for someone launching a public newsletter discussing history, politics, culture, and the philosophy of government.  But retirement is a phase for reinvention, I have questions for which I need answers, and there are problems I need to explore.  And I’m hopeful that my thoughts on these issues might not only be interesting to others but might even inspire some collective efforts at reform. 

If not, no harm done. 

Incidentally, I amuse myself by taking photos of derelict, abandoned, decrepit buildings; driving around, I find a lot of them. I’m a very amateurish amateur photographer, but I’ve ended up with hundreds of these images. Rather than let them go to waste, I’m likely to use some of them to decorate this newsletter. I find empty, crumbling structures gloomily beautiful but also—with perhaps too obvious symbolism—reflective of what is happening to the country at large.

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Democracy only works when the majority of citizens behave like grown-ups, respect the truth, and revere justice.