An Introduction

Just three long days ago, 30% of the eligible voters in America made a decision that the rest of the country and the world will live with for not only the next four years, but the effects of which will be felt for the next several decades. Whether you believe this decision was correct or misguided, manipulated or "free and fair", it is undeniable that statesmanship, thoughtfulness, and altruism have been drowned by political gamesmanship and expediency in the landscape of American governance.

This is partly the fault of our leaders, our two dominant political parties, the pundits, and the media. But they have only responded to our psychology in this decline. We, as the voting populace, react to the headlines, the soundbites, the attack ads, and the stump speeches just as quickly as our candidates react to the opinions of focus groups and the latest poll numbers. Few people take the time to watch more than the 1/2-hour evening news, much less read through to the end of a newspaper or magazine article. And now that many media outlets do nothing more than regurgitate the poll-tested quips of the campaign spokesperson, the cycle is complete.

We are being fed what we seem to desire. We may protest that we want better information, more balanced media, candidates of a higher caliber. But the choices we make in the voting booths speak to the dominance of our gut-level reaction over our intellect.

The gut-level. The instinct. For millions of years, it is what has kept us out of the mouths of tigers and out of the bumper of the car in front of us. Successful in the survival of the species, but not so effective at visions for a brighter future or aspirations for a better Us. For a time - the last several centuries perhaps - some people with the education or the luxury, or maybe just some gift for thoughtful consideration, held in their minds' eye a picture of this better world.

Over time they were able to communicate this vision to others, and eventually some majority of us were working toward something that we often could not touch or experience for ourselves. It was nothing more than a hope for our children or our grandchildren. But the hopes and dreams of slaves freed, of children wisely taught, of women enfranchised and empowered, of nations and continents liberated from tyranny by negotiation or force, were more than sufficient to keep the bulk of us working toward these distant, but not unattainable goals.

We have stumbled. We have tripped on our own instinct for self-preservation. We are so concerned about what we can touch and control in our immediate lives that we are no longer willing to sacrifice our immediate gratification in the service of dreams of a better future for all.

It is my goal in this forum, and with this life, to combine a generous portion of our visionary past with a healthy complement of modern research and thought, and with new dreams our forebears might never have conceived. If I am the least bit successful, then we might possibly not only give lip service to ideals, but use plausible, practical persuasion to shape the headlines, the soundbites, and the entire political framework.

Friends and strangers, I invite... no, I implore you to add your own carefully considered comments to my own at every opportunity. It is my intent to, over the course of time, develop our collective thought into a platform that we can each, and all, use to hold our elected and appointed leaders accountable. With enough participation we will slowly and surely change the underlying currents of public discourse. The surface waters and the ship of state can do nothing but be carried with us.