In the physical world as in other realms, it takes remarkably less time to destroy something than to rebuild it. A house burns in a matter of hours; perhaps a thousand such intervals are needed to make it habitable again. A single executive order unleashes a war; decades are required to repair what can be fixed.

Even on the individual level, this dynamic prevails. In the past year I’ve had a dozen conversations with deeply unhappy people who will spend months, even years, trying one purportedly quick fix after another—hoping to firebomb their misery into oblivion—because the thought of sitting down to tell their stories to a gifted therapist, an hour at a time over many weeks, is just too daunting. In the aggregate, the time and money invested are the same, but somehow, the investment is more palatable if each installment is conceived as the first and last.

Surely the inherent appeal of quick results is part of what attracts people to the type of nay-saying—burning down the house of democracy—preferred by media personalities like Glenn Beck and the Tea Party leaders. Surely this explains in part why negative campaigns, protesting objectionable policies or public figures, catch fire so much faster, blaze so much larger.

The conundrum I’ve been gnawing on lately is how to engage people in that slow building process, even when they see no reason for short-term hope.

For instance, I was deeply disappointed that President Obama’s new jobs initiative—in the face of terrible, despair-inducing unemployment—amounts to a tax credit for private businesses. Necessary, perhaps, but astoundingly insufficient to address the problem. This country has had two successful experiments in public service employment as a way to advance public goals, build infrastructure, and support job creation, the New Deal programs of the 1930s and CETA and other public service employment initiatives of the 1970s. (You can read brief descriptions here.)

Both took years to build up. Both were ended in no time flat by political fiat, by actions that had almost nothing to do with the programs’ merits and everything to do with a scorched-earth approach to regime change in the U.S., whereby the ascendant party seeks to obliterate any progress made by its predecessor. Both left a wide, deep wake of demoralization among advocates, such that it took years even to rehabilitate the rubric “public service employment.”

For most of my adult life, I’ve been a vocal supporter of public service jobs. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you know that from the first, one of my hopes for the Obama administration was a new WPA, a new public service jobs program to support artists and others in building community and making social institutions more humane and responsive. I’ve been writing for a while about the poetic synchronicity of 2010 being the 75th anniversary of the WPA, about how lovely it would be to pursue the same public aims today in ways that fit our own times and conditions. (To read some of my earlier essays on the subject, scroll down to “The New New Deal” and “A New WPA: Why a Sustainable Future Demands Cultural Recovery” on the Essays & Talks section of my Web site.)

I’m not the only one, not by a long-shot. If you google “WPA” or “New Deal,” you’ll find quite a few pages devoted to similar ideas. Special attention should go to WomenArts, which is devoting its SWAN Day events to honoring women artists of the WPA. I’ll update you soon about events in New York and the Bay Area in which I’ll be taking part.

But even in the first flush of Obama’s victory, when I spoke with inside-the-Beltway people about the idea, I drew a complete blank. It took them about 30 seconds to rifle through their mental databases and conclude that no actually existing member of Congress would support a new WPA right now. For them, that was enough to dismiss the idea for all time.

Markets are powerful mechanisms, an intrinsic part of every society on earth, one that more or less seems hard-wired into the human subject. I support interventions to make them greener, more transparent, more resourceful and innovative. But you have to be absolutely nuts to imagine they can serve all the needs of a vast, diverse and damaged society like ours. Right now, we have a huge public sector, with far too much of it supporting completely unproductive enterprises like wars and prisons. Very different public service jobs—in schools, community organizations, hospitals, public services, and so on—are absolutely necessary to the tasks of healing and building our society. All the arguments against them are purely ideological: “Government shouldn’t….” And that’s where my mind snaps: I get where the right-wing ideologues are coming from, and just how wrong they are. So how can intelligent, caring, liberals and progressives let them prevail? That’s what they do when they reject the slow building that would eventually change ideological nonsense into common sense, just because they can’t see the way to get a bill through Congress today.

I admit jobs are a pet issue for me, so pick your own issue: the situation is likely to be the same. Many more people are active on healthcare, peace, or environmental issues than on the cultural questions that obsess me. But each of those issues also suffers from the tyranny of the immediately doable, where the most intense public enthusiasm can be mustered for quick action (mostly to tear something down or stop something from happening), and the long, slow process of building seems so daunting that people find it hard to resist giving up.

What has happened to our perseverance and fortitude? Do you think it’s something in the water supply? Consider that Plessy v. Ferguson, establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine that legitimated racial segregation, was decided in 1896. Do you know how many court cases, hours of legal research and strategizing, years of activism, decades of fundraising it took to reach the end of that doctrine? Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, 58 years later. It took just as long for the idea of social insurance, introduced by progressives and unionists, to become law as Social Security in 1935. It took 70 years after the mid-19th century Seneca Falls Convention for women’s suffrage to be ratified in this country by the 19th amendment. The struggle for gay legal rights has persevered for decades. And in all these ways, changing laws has been a small part of working for full equality.

I wonder: if these struggles had to emerge from today’s conditions, would desire and persistence trump discouragement, or would too many people have been daunted because the road looked too long and difficult?

In some realms, people understand and accept the long time that building takes. There are good parents and good teachers who would find it absurd to resent the painstaking investment required to nurture a young and promising life; good farmers and foresters who understand permaculture and sustainable harvest; good healers prepared for the long haul of preventive care; good organizers who understand the cultivation democracy requires.

But much of the political picture looks different. The more daunted people are by current resistance to a needed policy, the longer they wait to start pursuing it in earnest, the more the timeline stretches out. What has me most worried now is the possibility that we are so addicted to burning down the house, we will postpone building for too long to recover.

Even writing that sentence goes against everything I care about. Mostly, my attention is on a simple truth: we have the numbers, the capacity and creativity to build, and we have proof that when people see a way their efforts can make a difference, they will act. But every day, a mountain of spin and drivel is deployed to obscure those truths from view. If creative thinkers and activists lack the will and perseverance to see through it, to overcome the tyranny of the immediately doable, to overcome the pervasive preference for burning down the house, the truth won’t matter much. People of vision will go on pursuing it, because that is who they are, but that won’t be enough to tip the balance.

It keeps coming down to the same thing, over and over again: the choice is yours, and mine, and each person’s to make. Dorothy Day, the founder of Catholic Worker, said it best, I think: “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”

Today’s sound track: “When Your Mind’s Made Up” by Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova, a lovely song that doesn’t quite mean what it says.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.

In the Hebrew calendar, this is the time of t’shuvah, literally turning, but often translated as repentance. In preparation for the new year, we inventory our missteps, the damage we have done and the damage we have sustained. We try to heal the broken places.

It is uncanny how often outer events mirror the fluctuations of spiritual time, of the deepest chambers of our hearts. What I write now echoes along countless corridors, but my specific subject is the scapegoating of Van Jones, President Obama’s special advisor for green jobs, and the good people’s silence that calls so loudly for repentance.

In case you have been on a cleansing media fast, here are the facts: Glenn Beck, a deranged right-wing commentator on Fox News, latched onto a time-honored tactic in American politics: attempting to unseat the powerful by scapegoating those close to them. Van Jones, a member of the well-documented generation, was repeatedly preserved on videotape rallying activists by recounting his own political trajectory. Banned words—communist, revolution—were spoken with fervor. Beck and his colleagues at Fox began beating the drum to a tune familiar since the witch trials of Salem: the devil was within the gates, and must be driven out. A few weeks of this, and Jones fell on his sword to protect his President, and perhaps his mission.

The ears of baby-boomers and our elders surely reverberated with echoes of Senator Joseph McCarthy when it was announced that Jones had stepped down. We remembered the many good people who lost their positions and livelihoods—and sometimes their sanity—when the senator and his red-baiting cohort made use of them to create a national panic. For a good long stretch in the late 1940s and 50s, the country was gripped by fear, by outright denunciations and whispering campaigns rivalling the fascists of both right and left who only a few years earlier had purged European social institutions, encouraging children to denounce their parents for suspect ideas or associations.

The technique perfected then (and first described in Hitler’s Mein Kampf) has been called “The Big Lie.” The idea is to assert something so outrageous that people doubt anyone would say it were it not true. Beck called President Obama a “racist,” shocking Color of Change (a group Van Jones cofounded) into action. Their campaign urging Beck’s advertisers to withdraw further antagonized Beck. He seized on Van Jones as his instrument of retaliation.

Beck used the time-tested trope that Jones was a dangerous radical, a communist. It’s a crude weapon but still a mightily effective one, a club with a rusty nail in it. But Jones isn’t the only outspoken activist in the Obama administration with a history of hyperbolic statements. Beck picked him for a second reason: he is a highly intelligent, high-achieving, attractive and charismatic African American male, and as such, a surrogate for President Obama. Jones’ past political statements gave Beck something to grab onto, protective coloration (so to speak) for the underlying racism of Beck’s crusade.

According to the dominant rules of engagement, scapegoating wins unless the target is big enough—beloved enough, known enough—to deflect it with a shield of readymade goodwill. Otherwise, it is presumed that the scapegoat’s protector will be dragged under while trying to rescue the victim. President Obama has made this calculation and evidently decided that the risk of going to the mat for Van Jones is too great to bear. While I wish it were otherwise, based on our actually existing politics, his reckoning is almost certainly accurate.

If it can’t be the president who defends Jones, then who has less to lose and more to gain in speaking out? The answer is just about everyone. But only a few organizations have come forward to express outrage and counter Beck’s campaign, and many of those have been based in communities of color, notably the NAACP. (Carl Pope of the Sierra Club wrote an outraged and interesting blog on it.)

In a Facebook note, my friend Ludovic Blain III asks where are the white liberal organizations that could be speaking out:

If white liberals can’t oppose racism we have a bigger disaster on our hands than climate change, because America’s commitment to white supremacy, if left unchallenged, will prevent us from dealing with the other important issues of the day, like climate change. As long as white liberals think these are parallel, rather than continuous tracks, they will continue to fail miserably.

I don’t know the answer to Ludovic’s question, but several possibilities occur.

They could fear tangling with a voracious far-right punditocracy which seemed to grow in appetite and impact even as the electoral right wing deflated. As every communicator knows, it is much easier to cry, “Stop!” and to tear something down than to engage in the painstaking steps of building. As in the fifties Red Scare, those who feel vulnerable, who fear becoming targets themselves, may duck and cover when the scapegoating starts, and even more so if Beck’s retaliatory attack succeeds without harming himself.

They could be expressing a narrowness of vision so characteristic of organized political forces in this country: groups focus on an issue or two while allowing the rest of the agenda to pass by, arguing that to do otherwise would dilute their power. I don’t think so. Indeed, I think our characteristically narrow focus has retarded the type of multi-issue, quasi-party movement that has elsewhere helped to bring about social progress more pervasive and lasting than anything we have been able to actualize for a long time. As someone whose concerns span many issues, I often feel frustrated at this constricted social sense. If green jobs isn’t “my” issue or “your” issue, perhaps equality is, or free speech, or the need for political dialogue not dominated by name-calling underwritten by major corporations. Any thread can unravel the tapestry.

They could be expressing underlying racism, the kind that can’t admit that now that we have a person of color as our national leader, deeply internalized, stubbornly rooted racial fear is going to bubble to the surface, and some type of gentlemen’s agreement not to mention will only make things worse. I ask myself if Van Jones had been white, (a) would Glenn Beck have picked him; (b) would a smear campaign have gained so much traction; and (c) would more organizations and notable names have risen to counter the campaign, to greater effect? Who can say with certainty? But this much is sure: you and I both know that it is unsupportable to answer these questions in a way that definitively denies racism a role.

They could be expressing the back-scratching, horse-trading resentment that is another repulsive feature of our political culture. Feminists of any heritage resent “family values” tendencies in communities of all colors, opposed or indifferent to reproductive choice. Gay rights advocates of any color resent opposition to legislation like California’s defeated Proposition 8, of course, but there is a feeling of betrayal, of the absence of reciprocity, in opposition emanating from communities very strong on other economic and civil rights, yet deeply resistant on some issues of gender and sexuality. Inner-city residents under siege of gentrification resent the mostly white artists and gay men who help trigger that phenomenon by moving in, then act indifferent to the consequences. And so it goes: in each instance, one out-group fails to rise to the defense of another. In my fantasy world, all of us are for everyone’s equal rights in every aspect of life. But unhappily for me, the world we live in is no fantasy.

Van Jones has stepped down, but in this time of t’shuvah, turning, repentance, it is not too late for those good people who have kept silent to repent, bringing their actions in line with the just causes of green jobs, free speech, and public discourse not dominated by television’s attack-dogs. I doubt Jones can be reinstated, but even that is conceivable, and certainly, preserving his mission is essential and doable.

We must act now to put a brake on scapegoating before it once again becomes the force that controls public life. The issue will not die down when headlines about Van Jones have faded. Now that Beck has tasted blood, his appetite will grow, and if we let it, sooner or later, one of his pack will be nipping at our heels.

Beyond all that, the need grows stronger every day for the honesty and vigilance I find myself trumpeting every time I get my hands on a keyboard. This is a cultural issue, and a profound one: will the culture of democracy survive? Are we going to watch democracy go down the drain, with the silence of good people as the soundtrack? Or will we seize every opportunity to surface, probe and declare the subtext of this and every other situation shaped by unarticulated fears, resentments and prejudices? The remedy for the silence that requires repentance is the constructive exercise of free speech.

So many of us were thrilled when President Obama was elected. He has been far from perfect, of course, but I shudder to think what John McCain and Sarah Palin would have done by now. Do you want to someday look back on his election as the opportunity for a new McCarthyism, compounded of fear, resentment and racism, to take root? Be silent now, and we will repent at leisure.

I’m a hard-core paradigm shifter. As I keep telling anyone who will listen, this is a liminal moment, when the modernist illusion that everything worth knowing can be weighed, measured and standardized is giving way to the infinitely richer view of the world derived from stories, rather than statistics. (See this essay in the inaugural issue of The Arts Politic, for instance.) It will be for succeeding generations to say whether those who see things as I do were deluded or prescient. For the moment, I’m going with my hopes.

After all, time is on my side. Whatever endures holds promise. As Janine Benyus says of a Chambered Nautilus, in this PopCast on “biomimicry,” borrowing engineering ideas from nature, “Three-point-eight billion years is a long time to tinker with shape.” She points out that water flows in the same logarithmic spiral that forms the shell, for instance, making it an energy-saving shape for fans and turbines.

When it comes to ambulatory life-forms, the developmental timeline is shorter, but the same principle pertains: it is a good idea for human beings to pay attention to systems and solutions that have evolved over time in natural contexts, because something very like them may work just as well in cultural contexts.

That has a sensible ring to it, doesn’t it? Yet we are just now emerging from an era so contaminated with technological hubris that the opposite has generally been deemed true: nature is messy and inefficient, so it’s much better to model our interventions on machines, where standardization and uniformity prevail—and then let human beings, that infinitely obliging species, adapt to the result. Janine Benyus’s fascinating talk focuses on solutions to manufacturing and conservation problems that use shape and texture and process derived from nature to create light, flexible, strong innovations instead of our typical expensively manufactured modern-era counterparts.

The underlying ideas apply to society as well. If permaculturists are learning from nature to make agriculture more like natural growing environments, with different species thriving in each other’s ambit—chickens amidst the cows, shrubs in the shadows of trees with vines twining up their trunks, root vegetables side-by-side with herbs—what can we learn about culture?

I have a few ideas that pertain to that sector of the cultural landscape we call “the arts,” although I think they are easily transferable to medicine, finance, education and other realms. What do you think?

Reciprocity: Nature is full of examples of animals engaged in an economy of favors in which basic fairness keeps things moving. Here’s another great PopCast from primatologist Frans de Waal that illustrates with cucumbers and grapes what we may have failed to learn from high finance. In the arts world, community artists and activists are forever being asked to support mainstream organizations in their quest for visibility and funding, but reciprocal support is seldom offered. In fact, arts advocacy groups whose CEOs make six-figure salaries or who get stimulus funds to retain jobs in their own ranks routinely ask underpaid artists to write, speak or otherwise share their work for free. In primate groups, everyone who contributes food gets fed. If we were as smart as de Waal’s monkeys, we’d stop saying yes without reciprocity.

Strong defending the weak: In the primate world, strong leaders maintain their dominance in part by standing up for the weak, collecting insurance in the form of gratitude. Nature also makes helpless babies cute, so their lovableness armors them by aligning them with protectors. In the arts world, something comparable almost never happens. Somewhere, there must an example of the white head of a major opera or ballet company or museum bravely speaking truth on behalf of struggling organizations in communities of color, for instance, but I haven’t found it yet.

Permaculture and ecology: Permaculture also shows us how varied and often weaker species thrive in the spaces created by big trees, a strategy of layering that sustains an entire ecosystem. It seems to me the major cultural institutions could earn the loyalty they desire by providing a great many nooks and crannies for a real diversity of voices and visions to find and keep their own places in the arts ecology. Like big trees in the forest garden, they would hold and feed the soil that sustains the entire system, instead of soaking up all the nutrients in solitary splendor. In a functioning forest ecology, every species has its unique role, but all are needed to sustain the whole in health and well-being. How would the arts ecology have to change if this were recognized?

Self-cleaning mechanisms: Nature makes the surfaces of many leaves smooth, creating efficient self-cleaning. When rain comes, dirt slides right off. I’d like to see more smooth surfaces in the arts world, with rich institutions taking the lead in green practices, for instance, immunizing themselves from the taint of waste that adheres to both the for-profit and non-profit creative industries. I’d like to see the economics of these rich institutions made much more transparent, rinsing away the self-dealing and scandal that seem endemic. How would these enterprises have to change so that dirt would no longer stick?

Self-organizing, flexible systems: The family, the tribe, the council of more-or-less equals, where differences in authority are earned by experience—these are self-organizing, flexible systems of collaboration and mutual support, fairly consistent across both nature and culture. (In culture, though, we can choose families not bound by blood.) Social psychologists tell us that most people have a finite capacity for relationship: there are only so many faces we can know and care about as individuals before they blur into a crowd. So the logical mode of organizing for any large system is a sort of federation of families or tribes, where the members of each unit are free to work out their relationships in the ways that seem best to them, so long as they engage in an adequate level of reciprocity with other units, like species in a forest garden.

In contrast, I am always amazed at how limited and weak the dominant forms of organizational relationship are in the red-carpet arts world: you can be a “friend of,” a subscriber, a volunteer or docent or the recipient of some special symbolic status conferred by the size of your donation. Instead of a tribe or federation, the model is a factory: we’re all widgets, each set to perform our discrete function until we wear out.

Janine Benyus says that in the natural world, success is keeping your offspring alive generations after your own demise. Since there’s no way to intervene directly in a future that outlives us, all we can do is create the conditions conducive to survival. I have written and spoken often about the necessity of art, given that imaginative empathy is the secret of human survival. But how should art’s ecology be organized to promote this type of success? It seems to me that a great deal more recognition and reciprocity are needed if culture is to learn from nature the lessons that science and technology are beginning to learn, to their benefit and ours.

Consensus is a beautiful idea. In Aristotle’s philosophy, everything has a telos, an end-purpose: for an acorn, it’s to become a mighty oak. In my way of thinking, the telos of politics is consensus—not unanimity, which is virtually impossible and probably dangerous for diverse human beings, but consensus, a noun that ought to be a verb. Just as in rising to its full height the oak needs both nourishment and something to push against, the body politic needs rich democratic dialogue and real contention to reach that moment in which the vast majority adopt a common position, either because they find it the best available alternative or because their own reservations are such that deferring to others does not offend their integrity.

For much of my professional life I assisted organizations and communities in reaching consensus on important questions of culture and development. I’ve found few things more satisfying that presiding as midwife over that moment in which a decision is born in the clear and unmistakeable light of the common welfare and greatest good. I know why Barack Obama reveres consensus. I even think achieving it is a worthy ideal for our country at a moment so marked by political venom as our own.

But the trouble with consensus is that you can only reach it with people who have reasons as strong as your own for entering fully into the process and attaining a good result. Absent such reasons, absent a powerful and mutual goodwill, persisting in the consensus process does little more heighten divisions and make problems worse.

Many signs point to President Obama’s reluctance to accept this. Because he wants consensus far more than the other party, his stance has been defensive. He embraced a stimulus bill designed to placate the right with inadvisable tax cuts and too little money to effectively rebuild infrastructure and jump-start economic recovery. He tried to appoint Judd Gregg, a self-described “strong fiscal conservative,” as Commerce Secretary at a time when “conservative” policies such a tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of finance have already hurt the country more than can be measured. And his comments upon Gregg’s withdrawal, as quoted in the New York Times, make him sound like a true believer heedless of the evidence, rather than a clear thinker grounded in reality: “’I am going to keep working at this,’ said Mr. Obama, adding that the American people were ‘desperate’ for Democrats and Republicans to work together.”

Let me tell you a cautionary tale about the way people of bad faith use love of consensus as a weapon to defeat those who threaten their privilege. In 1992, my husband and I were engaged by the Mendocino, California, County Board of Supervisors to design and facilitate a process that might save a well-intentioned attempt to create consensus on sustaining that rural county’s timber resource and jobs while protecting the environment. (If you have patience for all the details, you can read a blow-by-blow description we wrote in 1992: just go to the Essays & Talks page of my Web site and scroll down to the bottom of the “Essays & Articles” section to download “Hard Lessons: Mendocino’s Forest Advisory Committee.”)

In brief, the Supervisors created a task force comprising timber company representatives, environmentalists and people from public agencies such as the Forest Service, giving it the charge of hammering out a win-win solution in light of then-current economic and environmental reality. Corporate timber had just about logged out the local forests; if clear-cutting continued, there would be no future resource; but if logging ended, there would be no jobs for the substantial segment employed in that industry, long known locally as “King Timber” for its large footprint on the land and economy.

The task force met for two years. It was a strain on the environmentalists, who paid their own way and volunteered their own time for the arduous process (while the agency people and corporate employees performed their roles as part of salaried jobs). Sometimes the level of compromise was pretty strenuous too. But when consensus recommendations were issued, they felt it had been worth the effort.

That feeling didn’t last long. Unbeknownst to other members of the task force, those associated with timber corporations had been crafting a secret plan. They gave every appearance of entering fully into negotiations, but behind the scenes, they’d been seeking advice from the “Wise Use” movement, a shrewd effort to use pro-environmental language and imagery to package its exact opposite. They issued a surprise minority report, charging that the consensus document did not represent them, that they had been railroaded. They used all the media savvy and manipulation at their disposal to portray themselves as an oppressed minority. They mobilized busloads of workers bearing yellow ribbons and family pictures to pack hearing rooms when the recommendations were considered, training them to stamp their feet in unison to drown out countervailing views.

And the people who’d sought consensus in good faith? They were left at the altar, alone and bereft.

We designed a process that made it possible to hold public meetings and deliberate without undue disruption, and the recommendations ultimately came to a vote, failing by one vote to pass the Board of Supervisors. So in the short term, the bad-faith contingent succeeded. But the story didn’t end there. Corporate timber took the remaining trees, then departed for the global south where labor is cheaper and trees more plentiful, callously ending those well-paying jobs in Mendocino County its spokespeople promised to preserve. When the truth became evident, some new Supervisors were elected and a version of the sustainable forestry principles was adopted, so the ultimate policy outcome owed very little to consensus politics and much to electing a principled majority. Without a major corporate presence remaining, small landowners in Mendocino County now work toward sustainable forestry in various ways.

In his 1945 essay, “Reflections on Drawing the Line,” my intellectual hero Paul Goodman tells a joke:

“Tom says to Jerry: ‘Do you want to fight? Cross that line!’ and Jerry does. ‘Now,’ cries Tom, ‘you’re on my side!’”

Turning oppositional energy into alignment is the highest political achievement. Perhaps that is why it is also the rarest. If Barack Obama asked my advice today, I’d tell him to hold onto his conviction of the beauty and necessity of consensus, but face the facts of the moment. If his intended partners aren’t willing to enter fully into the dance, return them to the sidelines, then rejoin those who take to the floor with enthusiasm.

The trouble with my warning about overreaching for consensus, though, is that it can lead to the opposite, extreme polarization conditioned on judging one’s opponent incapable of good faith. Saturday’s New York Times featured a cynical piece chiding Obama for not learning from prior exectives’ disappointments with cross-party collaboration. Taken to its logical conclusion, this thinking generates a policy of shoot first, ask questions later, as we see around the globe and at home. So I have the utmost respect for the necessity of trying for consensus. Having done that and failed, if I were President Obama, here’s what I’d say now:

“In this moment of crisis and pain for so many Americans and so many others around the world, the best path is to let go of petty rivalries and unearned loyalties and work together for the common good, which is what I’ve been trying to do. It’s hard to see why anyone would act otherwise, but if you’ve been following the news, you’ve seen people who put party before nation, a sad thing for America. Here’s what I say to any and all: if you join me with full faith and credit in committing to seeking real consensus, I will welcome you as partners and willingly enter into reasonable compromise. If you can’t do that, don’t waste our nation’s time when we haven’t got time to spare. Get out of the way, because we’re coming through!”

President Obama is a smart man. I hope he’s smart enough to let go of illusion, but that remains to be seen.

Gargantua and Pantagruel were two mythical giants chronicled in five 16th-century satirical novels by Rabelais. Pantagruel is remarkable for his insatiable appetite, which reminds me irresistibly of the rise in oil-company profit-taking which has led to an unprecedented increase in gasoline prices. Yesterday, the checkout clerk at the grocery store joked that she had just filled her tank for $25: “It was my lawnmower, of course.” Day after day, headlines tell us that the events predicted by peak oil activists ( click here to read what I wrote about it three years ago) are beginning to happen: SUV sales dropping fast, people choosing public rather than private transportation or vacationing at home, choosing the “new urbanism” over suburban sprawl.

I have a friend who refers to “the greed culture” as an historical category, like the Renaissance. He told me that young people today can’t be expected to understand how commonplace egalitarian values were when he and I were their age: “They don’t understand how popular the discourse was about freedom and experimentation, popular culture, a progressive politics, undoing racism, feminism, identity politics and gay liberation, the civil rights movement, all that. There was lots of support for thinking that way before the Republican revolution and the culture of greed.”

I was discussing this with another friend who said that, as with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous 1964 quip on obscenity, she can’t quite define greed but she knows it when she sees it. But I think I can define it, at least for practical purposes, as that distortion of personality that persuades its victim that enough is never enough. We are in the midst of a growing plague of people whose appetite for material possessions can never be satisfied.

The local paper featured side-by-side headlines yesterday: “Home prices take new hit” and “Ranks of millionaires still swelling.” The first carried a subhead “but foreclosure sales may be distorting statistics”—you think?

The second headline was linked to the World Wealth Report 2008, which shows a 6 percent worldwide increase in millionaires—an 11 percent increase in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. The report was issued by a business consulting firm and Merrill Lynch, so it focuses on HNWI’s (High Net Worth Individuals), failing to mention the corresponding growth in poverty. Nor do average housing prices tell the whole story, as sales prices have actually risen in HNWI neighborhoods like parts of San Francisco, Marin County and Silicon Valley, even as they drop sharply in places where high-risk mortgage practices have led to an epidemic of foreclosures.

Last night at sundown, the sky was a disturbing shade of lilac. All day, thin sunlight in darkened skies kept fooling me into misjudging the time. California is on fire: they say that more than 2,000 lightning-caused fires are burning around the state, partially contained at best. I live a hundred miles from most of the fires, and when I wake up in the morning, there’s a smell like burnt rubber in the air. Even now, sitting inside my house with the windows closed, my throat hurts.

My friends who live in the country a couple of hours north of here, where I lived for a dozen years, are right in the path of a fast fire. They are conscientious stewards of the land, living off the grid, and hope that the firebreaks they’ve dug and their access to ponds (plus a water tank truck borrowed from a friend and a good supply of face masks and burlap sacks) will save the home they built with their own sweat. They are moving their animals and most critical possessions off the land, organizing brigades with their neighbors because the state doesn’t have enough firefighters and firefighting equipment to respond to even a fraction of the fires that are threatening forests, grasslands and agricultural regions. Meanwhile, timber companies and other well-financed corporations are hiring private crews and helicopters from out of state. Here too, we see what it is to have two classes of citizens, and how the difference can mean life or death.

On NPR on Sunday, I heard a very interesting interview with John Barry, a New Orleans levee commissioner, observing the same phenomenon in relation to water:

“Around the world, people laugh at the standards the U.S. uses for flood protection. In Holland, they use a 10,000-year standard. They protect against ocean floods for a one in 10,000 chance every single year. And for river floods they protect—depending on how populated the area is—from a 250-year standard minimum up to over a 1000-year standard, and roughly the same standards are used in Japan and other advanced societies. And we’re still fighting to reach a 100-year standard. Many of the levees in the Upper Midwest were less than a 100-year standard. So the level of investment in infrastructure just isn’t there.”

The question is being put to us now: common good or culture of greed? A lot of money has overfilled already fat pockets through decisions to allow predatory lending practices without regard for social well-being, obscene profit-taking without regard for the people who pay, and policies conditioned on cost-benefit analyses that leave out human costs. At the same time, we’ve seen a tremendous rise in democratic activism around the Obama campaign, the remarkable legalization of same-sex marriage in California, the fact that California and Illinois have both filed suits citing deceptive practices against Countrywide Financial, the country’s largest mortgage lender and servicer. Dissent from the policies that created our predicament is at an all-time high.

My beloved iPod died this week. (May you never see the sad iPod face appear on your little screen!) I made an appointment at the Apple store Genius Bar to hear death pronounced, and now I have had two days of errands and chores without a soundtrack, rediscovering old technologies like radio. This morning on NPR, I happened to hear a story about Hal Halvorsen, an American World War II pilot who flew in the Berlin Airlift, the Allied response to the post-war Soviet blockade of the city. He risked punishment by dropping Hershey bars and chewing gum for kids who’d never tasted sweets. The airlift supplied all the staple food and fuel needed to sustain life, up to 5,000 tons a day for nearly a year, all directed at people who had been attacked as enemies a short time before. The children learned to recognize the candy drops by the distinctive way Halvorsen wiggled the wings of his plane.

All of this is in us: the capacity to open our hearts to those who have been enemies and the desire for healing, the insatiable greed that ignores human costs. In a shakeout, a system reorganizes itself in response to new stimuli. The question is, reorganize toward what ends? Walk through one doorway and we adjust ourselves to a Gargantua and Pantagruel world, where human life is collateral damage; through the other door, a paradigm shift where we finally awaken to the choice that puts stewardship and healing first. The question is being put with unmistakable clarity. How will we answer? It’s going to take a little time to find out. Right now and urgently, the first step is drawing attention more and more forcefully to this epochal choice.