Riffing on Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s great comment, I want to try and explain (again) why I keep harping on this issue (she defined it incisively:I believe there’s a largely unacknowledged divide between politicians who still believe we’re all members of the same polity, all citizens together; and those for whom I’m just a member of the voting audience, watching but not otherwise a participant in our regularly scheduled pantomime of democracy.).
It relates closely to why I refuse to support Gray Davis, and why I harsh writers like Hesiod and Tom.
Let me make a metaphor first.
I’ve done a fair amount of first-aid training; I’ve participated in risky sports – climbing, sailing, racing cars, bicycles, and motorcycles – most of my life, and a long time ago, someone died as a part of one of my sports activities when I was a freshman in college, driving home the point of risk and of shared responsibility.
Part of the responsibility is taking proper precautions (why I’m sometimes called ‘the Safety Nazi’), and part of it is taking responsibility for consequences – hence the first aid.
One of the things they train you to do (and here the more advanced medical bloggers are free to comment and clarify) is to evaluate someone’s condition, and deal with the most critical issues first.
A compound fracture is and looks bad, but a blocked airway is worse.
You have to look beyond the superficial symptoms and try and determine what underlying conditions are serious and how best to deal with them.
This was brought home to me last week when someone I know on an internet list died. He was in what appeared to be a relatively minor accident, received superficial care from the attending EMT’s, who transported him to the hospital, where it was discovered that he had severe bleeding in a lung, which couldn’t be controlled, and he bled out and died. I don’t know all the facts, and certainly don’t know from my limited information if better diagnosis would have made a difference to him (and his grieving family). But I do know that that is the practitioner’s nightmare…to fix the scraped knee and miss the bubbling lung.
Our country – our world – is definitely not short of scraped knees, and people with band-aids ready to fix them, if only we’ll vote for them.
But some of us…including me…hear a frightening bubbling coming from the lungs.
We face huge systemic challenges, coming from rising population, misallocation and shortages of key resources, a huge gap between the First and Third World, compounded by closer economic, informational, and transportation ties that will make these challenges abroad into ours.
We have challenges at home, in poverty and alienation, as well as education, health care, and the environment.
To deal with these wisely will require that we restate our commitment to some common goals, and to some processes – some governmental, some political, some private – that will tie us to these common goals. And we must do it while maintaining and improving both freedoms – the freedom to, and the freedom from. And it is exactly that shared commitment to some set of goals, and that shared sense of common citizenship that is eroded by the kind of politics and kind of commentary that I criticize.
If we don’t deal with these, our country and our world will look far different and far worse than if we do. The worlds of Blade Runner and Snow Crash aren’t impossible dystopias. They are very possible dystopias, and I don’t want my children to live in them.
I’ve talked about this a lot. Here’s one quote:

We’re at a point in our history when we need to find the threads that bind us into a nation and a polity. Sadly, ‘win at any cost’ politicians (c.f. Gray ‘SkyBox’ Davis), and culture warriors of one stripe or another are happy to drive wedges, if they believe the fractures serve their short-term political interests.
And we’re at a point in our political history that’s been made by single-issue warriors…for and against development, for and against abortion, for and against parks for dogs…and damn those on the other side of the issue.
I had the unique opportunity to have dinner once with then-State Senator John Schmitz. He was a genuine John Birch society member, elected from Orange County, who lost his office when it was discovered that his mistress had sexually abused their sons. (His daughter is also Mary Kay Le Tourneau, so I’ll take as a given that the family had…issues…). He was still in the Senate, and made a comment that I’ve always remembered:

When Moscone ran the Senate, he and I used to fight hammer and tongs all day, then go out and have drinks over dinner and laugh about it. We differed on where we wanted the boat to go, but we recognized that we were in the same boat. These new guys would gladly sink the boat rather then compromise.

And that’s why I think the [pledge]decision was stupid, and why the forces behind it…the Church of My Wounded Feelings…and their soldiers, the Warrior Cult of the Single Issue…are incredibly destructive. And right now, we don’t have the time for it.

Yes, Gray Davis has put some good band-aids on the scabs I think are important. Yes, a Republican Congress would probably put band-aids on scabs I think are totally unimportant, and worse, damaging. I’ll clearly continue to argue for the things that matter to me, no matter how small.
But I’m just done participating in a game of ‘kiss the boo-boo’ and believing that I’m really doing anything to help the patient. I want to get the heart and lungs examined, and I want to find and support people who support making sure the patient doesn’t die before they worry about the cuts and bruises.