When a pig flies, you say? Look north, up in the sky, what’s that pink blob flapping over Iceland?

Jon Gnarr, the new mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland, is a comedian by trade. In fact, it was widely assumed that he embarked on his election campaign primarily to satirize political conventions, using his skills as a humorist to highlight the absurdity of his city’s actual existing government.

Then he won.

The Reykjavik city council has 15 seats, and Gnarr’s party (”The Best Party,” of course) won six of them. Needing coalition partners to govern, Gnarr announced he wouldn’t form an alliance with anyone who hadn’t seen all five seasons of the 2002-2008 HBO series The Wire, a brilliant, challenging, complex portrayal of the interlocking realities of Baltimore’s illicit drug economy, police, schools, government, media, and politics.

I watched the 60th and final episode yesterday on Netflix, and if only I could speak Icelandic, I’d offer my services to Gnarr. The series ought to be compulsory viewing not only for elected officials, but for everyone who takes part in electing them.

I’ve been thinking about The Wire all week, as I’ve read about the wreck of our economy, with more and more jobs lost and many commentators continuing to be astounded—astounded, I say—at the private sector’s failure to do much about it.

In times of great uncertainty, people are fearful of spending their money. They tend to be guided by conventional wisdom of the kindergarten variety: I’d better keep all my pennies in the piggy-bank, because if I spend them, I might end up with none. Hiring new employees is an investment in the future that many business-owners are currently unprepared to make. The median duration of unemployment is edging close to six months; and when you add up official figures for all the categories of job-seeker, the overall unemployment rate is a terrifying 16.5 percent. (Which means the unofficial rate is higher still.)

When fear spirals, someone needs to step up and loosen its grip. Spending may be counterintuitive according to piggy-bank philosophy, but our public sector should right now be spending money to create employment, initializing the flow of opportunity and capital needed to revive the economy. Instead, economic reality has been pushed aside in favor of comic economics, where austerity is prescribed, in a throwback to the days of bleeding the patient to cure disease, a treatment that often ended by bleeding the poor person dry.

Paul Krugman had a great recent column on the way this dynamic takes hold. He demolishes the arguments for austerity in the face of fear, equipping readers to take this advice:

[T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation.

There are exceptions to the austerity rule, of course. Usually, no matter how loud the austerity buzz, you can’t go wrong spending money on the things the right-wing embraces, notably war. It used to be that launching a war could be counted on to jump-start industries and employ large numbers of job-seeking young men. But over $281 billion so far in Afghanistan (and counting) hasn’t done the trick. (If President Obama gets the supplemental funding he has requested from Congress, his own allocations for the Afghanistan War will total $100 billion in a year and a half in office.)

But our wars figure remarkably little into our national dialogue about the economy. In a massive act of misdirection, we are told to pay no attention to the national punishment budget (i.e., wars and prisons), to focus instead on social spending as the culprit. As The Wire excelled in showing, in every realm of power, from the streets to the statehouse, the official reality that is proclaimed for public consumption often bears little resemblance to the principles and behaviors that actually guide power-relations. And so it has gone for the federal role in job creation, where brave pronouncements about stimulating the economy serve as camouflage for pathetically weak initiatives. I wrote back in March about President Obama’s tax credit legislation, touted as a major response to joblessness:

[T]he benefit amounts to forgiveness of the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax, plus an additional $1,000 in tax credit if the employee is retained for a year. This equals a fraction of the cost of hiring someone. It ought to be called the McDonald’s-Wal-Mart bill, because it will primarily benefit low-wage, high-turnover businesses. Hire someone for minimum wage, keep him or her for a year, collect the benefits….

In The Wire, drug lords, corner boys, dockworkers, school officials, newspaper editors, and city council members all pronounce nobly high-minded ideals, and some actually practice them to the best of their ability. But they are vastly outnumbered by those whose prime directives are looking good (and if that’s not possible, saving face), and evading or defeating their competitors at any price.

Drug suppliers murder those who threaten their dominion, or, when the flow of blood threatens to drown them, form cartels to convert competition to shared self-interest. School officials distort curriculum to raise test scores, quickly suppressing any experiment that might disrupt school funding, even successful ones. Newspaper editors turn a blind eye to faux news if it sells papers. Union officials grease all the right palms to keep the docks working, postponing the day when the rank-and-file will feel the full impact of mechanization and the concomitant loss of jobs. Public officials trade in bribes and cover up misdeeds that might hurt their election chances. And the police, who along with drug dealers create the through-line of all five seasons, cook crime statistics to match the prevailing political winds.

There are benefits to the system, to be sure. The Wire’s intricate drug trade choreography is as elegant a depiction of robber-baron capitalism as I have seen, featuring street-corner equivalents of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and for that matter, Horatio Alger. The survival-of-the-fittest ethos that marks each of the city’s interlocking systems offers tremendous scope for the gifted, and there is a kind of beauty in seeing them exercise it, like watching an athlete pull ahead of opponents, making it look easy.

But mostly, the takeaway, while always riveting, is less uplifting. It is the stark truth of self-serving patterns of power, holographic in their omnipresence, from corner-boy spats to political horse-trading: that in a corrupt system, those in power almost always know what is right, but almost always choose what is expedient.

In the column I cited above, Paul Krugman attributes our dismal performance on public-sector spending to distorted but bright-sounding ideas that become conventional wisdom without first passing any real-world tests. Maybe so. But I attribute it more to that basic political lesson taught by The Wire. Public-sector job-creation is absolutely essential to recovery (and if you’ve been reading my stuff in the last year or two, you know that includes public-sector arts jobs). You could say that the Obama team is beholden to the banking industry, like every administration, and that would be a part of the truth. But at bottom, the fact that a Democratic administration with epidemic unemployment has not proposed a new WPA seems to me attributable to one thing: an appetite for political self-preservation that supersedes the public good.

The Obama team (like every other presidential team since Ronald Reagan abolished public service employment with one of his first presidential pen-strokes) is afraid to come out for public-sector job creation because Democrats feel politically vulnerable to Republicans who denounce government spending. While such denunciations form the sound-track whenever the right is in office, those same administrations have typically run up record deficits via tax cuts and industry subsidies. From the micro to the macro, far too much of electoral politics is consistent with The Wire’s philosophy of saying whatever will win, then doing whatever you can get away with.

The calculation is simple: in exchange for looking like cost-cutters at a time when the wind is blowing toward austerity, the Obama team is willing for vast numbers to live with the downward spiral of lost jobs, foreclosed homes, underfunded schools and our whole sad (and still-unfolding) saga of licensed depredation. Like the drug lords and police commissioners in The Wire, they aren’t troubled overmuch by asking the body politic to bear the cost for of their refusal to act with courage and conviction.

Iceland got its wake-up call from a crippling banking collapse triggered by financial deregulation that has by now greatly devalued the nation’s currency and almost put its stock exchange out of business. Two years ago, the country’s unemployment rate was 1 percent, and now it’s around 8 1/2 percent. The cost of the crisis is estimated at more than three-quarters of Iceland’s gross domestic product.

On this Independence Day holiday, my wish is to wake to the sound of awareness dawning in time to head off a comparable result in the U.S.

Meantime, this holiday calls for citizenship education. Follow Jon Gnarr’s advice and watch The Wire, which will at least kindle the hope of honor among thieves. In the first season, Bunk Moreland, played by the wonderful actor Wendell Pierce (who was one of the artist-activist delegates to the White House meeting I helped organize in 2009) is talking with Omar Little (Michael K. Williams’ deeply beautiful and disturbing portrait of a gay thief and murderer who consistently outsmarts the drug lords). In a strategic move of grandmaster chess, Omar comes forward to identify a killer:

Bunk: So, you’re my eyeball witness, huh? [Omar nods] So, why’d you step up on this?
Omar: Bird triflin’, basically. Kill an everyday workin’ man and all. I mean, I do some dirt, too, but I ain’t never put my gun on nobody that wasn’t in the game.
Bunk: A man must have a code.
Omar: Oh, no doubt.

The series’ theme song is “Way Down in The Hole,” with a different artist’s version for each season. They’re all great, starting with the Blind Boys of Alabama. Here’s the last one, by Steve Earle, who also has a recurring role as the AA sponsor of the series’ most redemptive character, Bubbles, played with angelic sweetness by Andre Royo. Art illuminates life.

By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives is by Judith Tannenbaum, a writer I am proud to call my friend, and Spoon Jackson, a writer whom I have never met. Reading their alternating chapters in By Heart has made me feel as if I know them both, though, so I will use first names.

Judith and Spoon are very different in almost all respects: man/woman, living in prison and in the world beyond its walls, black/white, romantic/careful. The book is about their separate journeys, intersecting first at San Quentin, where Judith taught and Spoon studied poetry, then bobbing and weaving through their contrasting worlds, life inside and outside, shaped by literature and longing.

By Heart touches on many subjects that are—and ought to be—central to our national conversation now, when punishment has expanded so far into our understanding of public purpose that it might as well be our name. We learn how one child is beaten into a corner that lasts a lifetime; and another finds a way to resist being cornered by fear. We see the waste and cruelty the dominates our prison system, and the resilience that sometimes flourishes despite it. We meet poets and prison officials and movie stars, and read about great adventures of the heart and spirit.

Above all, we see two people whose very different lives were saved by art, by the awakening of their capacities for social and personal imagination, by their separate and mutual embrace of the word and its power to heal, reveal, scold, seduce, illuminate. Watching Judith and Spoon become poets, we see them awaken to life’s possibilities, despite very real restrictions and constrictions. We see them becoming.

In his one-paragraph story, “On Exactitude in Science,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges describes how cartographers’ quest for absolute accuracy produces a map that is exactly the same size as the territory it covers. Just so, a book that represents in total accuracy the complete trajectory of two lives would take exactly as long as those lives to write and to read. Of necessity, much is omitted from By Heart. In the fashion of all humans, both authors’ stories are shaped by the intensity of the gaze they direct at certain aspects of their experience, and by the times they look away. The map cannot be the territory. What both authors have chosen to include has a magical, expansive quality I associate with water, each episode flowing into the next, each written sentence hinting at what has been washed away between the lines. As I read it, I had a feeling I have previously experienced only in face-to-face dialogue, where the timbre of another’s voice sets up a subtle answering vibration in the reader’s own throat. I didn’t want it to end.

There is a wealth of material online. You can hear Spoon read from an early chapter about his childhood in the Mojave Desert, or read an excerpt from one of his chapters on the Community Arts Network, or see a video trailer for the book with Judith and Spoon reading over images of San Quentin and Barstow.

Every day, I think about what we will do to turn away from our collective obsession with punishment, investing instead in our boundless creativity. The first step to any antidote is to free the social imagination, shattering the embedded categories that keep us from seeing fully human beings when we hear the word “prisoners” (and maybe the word “poets” too). When we allow the texture of a life to emerge from generalization into full dimensionality—and it is art that makes this possible—we can no longer think of that life merely as a thing, a number, a problem to be dispatched.

All of us are no more than a degree or two from the choices that have made the United States Incarceration Nation, with more prisoners, often in horrific conditions, than any other country. If we don’t know someone who works in the courts or criminal justice system, we know someone who has been taken into that system, or someone who supplies it with food or builds prisons or profits from it in another way. And all of us uphold it with our taxes. So after you buy a copy of By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives and finish reading it, you can give it to just about anyone you know, in serene confidence that they will need to read it too, and that your giving it to them will make a difference—and not just in their own experience.

I still remember the eerie lack of attention to our childish feelings when I was in grade school. Back in the dark(er) ages, there was a kind of default assumption that kids didn’t remember things, that their infinite plasticity would overcome whatever trauma they had experienced. Now, it is more commonly thought they need a little help.

Just so, it’s now a common feature of schoolrooms that children are prepared to recognize bullying when it rears its ugly head, and coached in safe methods of alerting responsible adults to the distortions of personal power to which some children fall prey. There are some excellent resources for classroom use.

Yet if the classic definition of bullying is preying on those weaker than oneself, the bullying at the top of the school food chain that sends children to prison for playground spats has not been recognized as the same phenomenon. And beyond school, in the organization or workplace, the same attention has not been paid.

What are we doing to create this climate, in the larger society and in the little worlds of our own organizations and workplaces?

The whiplash effect of amplifying both punishment and support confuses me, and I bet it confuses kids too. I wonder what impact this will have on the way they behave in civil society when they grow up. I don’t see older generations doing much at the moment to clear up the confusion. Instead, we seem to be drinking daily of that strange cocktail, equal parts proclaimed caring and impassioned punishment. Consider the way we treat the unemployed: large (and largely empty) expressions of public caring, such as workshops in how to improve one’s resume and conduct oneself in an interview, reducing the problem to personal inadequacy; and a punishing shame that attaches to the condition of being unemployed, no matter how many people join those ranks.

Indeed, as I have had many occasions to remark lately, C. Wright Mills was oh, so right when he talked about the American proclivity to treat public issues as private troubles. The link he made was between individual human misery and social policy: in our world—still, still—the unemployed person is made to feel a failure, even when unemployment is epidemic, even when it stems from moral and other failures on much higher levels. But the reduction of public issues to private troubles is also expressed on the small scale of an organization or workplace, when individuals are singled out for some form of bullying by bosses and coworkers who are moved to cruelty to avoid facing the larger truth of their own situations.

Some targets are already marked for bullying by fortune: perhaps they stutter or suffer from shyness or belong to a vilified social category, a racial or sexual out-group. By the time we attain adulthood, most of us have experienced a great deal of persuasion and pressure to treat suffering as punishment that has somehow been earned, as license to punish further.

Some targets are the opposite: energetic, ambitious for social change, singling themselves out through hard work and accomplishment, thus attracting envy and acrimony from those whose own efforts feel inadequate by comparison.

The point of political organizing is to midwife into being the collective understanding that what happens to the many is a matter of policy, not personal luck or transgression, and that regardless of the individual remedies any of us might employ to float our little boats, there are overarching interventions that can lift all ships. While many people who came up in my generation have been dedicated activists and healers, we have not yet managed to shift our national culture of punishment many degrees toward compassion. The privatization of suffering continues.

Nothing in this larger situation impedes our ability to practice democracy and compassion on the small scale of our own personal and working relationships. Yet I have observed in decades of working with organizations that the practice of small-scale democracy, the habit of infusing our working relationships with caring, with the self-awareness that is the best antidote to an excess of self-regard—these skills are not universally practiced.

Instead, far too frequently, people who crusade for justice in the big world exercise their surplus powerlessness in the little world of the organization. Frustrated in their larger aims, restless after a lifetime of struggle, they easily fall into exercising their frustration through abuse and domination of coworkers. And far too often, this is allowed to continue, not out of malice, but self-protection: the resentment that animates scapegoating is permitted to flourish because so many people would rather look the other way and let a bully reign than risk becoming targets themselves.

Because I’ve worked for so many years with progressive groups, people tend to tell me their stories, the way the doctor at a cocktail party tends to learn about other guests’ physical symptoms. And here is the hard nut of it: there are too many progressive groups espousing (and practicing) social justice and compassion in relation to a particular issue—healthcare, environmental justice, immigration, and so on—yet allowing petty jealousies, bored fantasies, and mob psychology to generate workplace bullying. As far as I can see, there is only one difference between this and the type of big-world political scapegoating that generates so much outrage among progressives: scale.

When you sow these behaviors in an organization, you harvest bitterness. The shy or odd or easy targets back away, lacking the stamina to persevere. The go-getters take their energy somewhere else, somewhere they will be less susceptible to friendly fire. And everything recedes to that species of running in place so typical of organizations in which such behavior is neither acknowledged nor repaired.

When you sow these behaviors in the larger society, you get a garrison state, Incarceration Nation, a society in which the suffering of the weak incites the punitive impulse, over and over again. I feel certain that the values of compassion and fairness progressives are working for in the big world have to be practiced on the smallest scales, or the whole enterprise will fail. Not long ago, someone sent me a Web resource on the issue of workplace bullying. Take a look. Is this happening to you? Are you standing aside while it happens to others? Have you allowed yourself to get caught up in the lust for punishment? Every day is a good day to notice this, and if need be, change it.

Today, I write first about the big questions of educational provision; and then about the spark that ignites the hunger to learn, without which no meaningful education is possible.

On Thursday, March 4th, actions and demonstrations are planned statewide to oppose layoffs, pay cuts, fee hikes and spending cuts in California’s educational system. Will there be a massive showing? Something that brings business-as-usual to a halt like the immigration reform protests of 2006? And if students do turn out (along with faculty, parents and others who work in the schools) to proclaim their own shared interests in good and affordable public education, will the powers-that-be take heed?

The proximate cause of these protests was a tuition hike of nearly one-third imposed by the University of California Board of Regents last fall. It came in response to cuts to the state education budget (our stalwart legislators were evidently undeterred by the shame of prison spending outstripping higher education). The state’s budget woes stem in part from corruption and mismanagement (such as the billion-dollar loss from Enron’s manipulation of California’s energy market early in this decade), in part from bad policies.

Consider Proposition 13, for instance, the 1978 initiative that limited property tax rates and required a two-thirds legislative majority to raise taxes. It has crippled public libraries, hampered fire departments’ ability to deal with disaster, done tremendous damage to public services and infrastructure. Schools aren’t funded primarily by property-tax revenue, so the fact that California’s schools (once considered the nation’s best) are at the bottom of the list according to student achievement tests isn’t directly attributable to Prop 13. But those who remember how to add and subtract can tote up this zero-sum game to see that a simple-minded scheme to strangle government has triggered a crisis across the entire public sector, including a shameful neglect of education.

Life keeps drawing a line. Once again, we are faced with a question of vital import, one that goes to the heart of our collective identity: What do we stand for? Will the future know us as an historical aberration, the callous people who were willing to sacrifice the next generation to build prisons and uphold corporate profits? Or as people who eventually awakened from that nightmare and began to invest in a livable, sustainable future?

As a partial answer, in the next election, I’ll be voting for a corrective initiative, The California Democracy Act, a constitutional amendment proposed by George Lakoff, consisting of a single sentence: “All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote.”

From preschool on up, supporting able and ample faculty and staff, welcoming and well-equipped facilities, easy access to low-cost education—kind of a no-brainer, hm? If the question didn’t come packaged by politicians as a Hobson’s choice (i.e., cut the budget or bankrupt the state, because raising taxes isn’t an option), I doubt many people would say, “No, I’d rather have bad schools.”

So yes, we need to create optimal conditions for learning, by supporting those dedicated to its practice and equipping them with the necessary tools and environments, by creating systems in which every child does count. I hope that a surprisingly large number of students make themselves evident on Thursday (or any day) as advocates for their own education, bringing this point home.

But I’m not certain how many of them share the conviction that their own actions could help to turn the tide. I have a friend, by all accounts an able and dedicated educator, who teaches at a prestigious public university. He told me that only one student in a group of nearly one hundred responded to his offer of information about Thursday’s events. He sees a pervasive passivity he finds disturbing, an inclination toward higher education as a chore to be completed with the least effort.

He described a remarkable moment in his own understanding: the day he had to spell out the rule that students could not satisfy his requirements for a classroom presentation by printing out the relevant Wikipedia entry and reading it aloud. “Go to an actual library,” he told them. “Check out two actual books, write your own presentation, bring the books to class and point out—with reference to specific passages—how they influenced your presentation.”

At least he knew they weren’t texting or playing online games as he enumerated these guidelines, because he’d earlier had to forbid using computers or cellphones during class.

I recounted this story to another friend as we walked along the Bay on Sunday. It was a beautiful day, with thick, creamy clouds along the horizon; ground-hugging ice plant bursting out in yellow, magenta, ivory and pink; and a bevy of long-billed curlews rooting in the sand for delicacies. The two of us—who in our different ways had been imprinted by the Sixties the way baby ducks cry “Mother!” at the first thing their newly opened eyes regard—had heard a raft of stories like this. We were trying to understand them, to avoid easy conclusions. It would be silly to imagine that young people today are in any way less-equipped by nature to learn than were their forebears. But it seems that much of today’s higher learning is understood by a large number of students as a passive experience, more a matter of what the great Paulo Freire dubbed “banking education” (where learning is deposited and the student is the receptacle), than of the excitement I associate with intellectual curiosity.

Strolling along, talking a mile a minute, we didn’t want to be curmudgeons, enacting the tradition of condemning younger generations: What’s the matter with kids today? That has been done for so many generations, I have little doubt that it’s a reflex rather than the product of careful reflection. So my companion talked about the obstacles to good education: budget cuts, poor facilities, too-large classrooms, textbooks constrained by the desire to avoid offending conservatives. All true. (And also true that amidst the wreckage of American public education, there are wonderful teachers, administrators, teaching artists, supportive school communities, parents and students dedicated to deep learning.)

For my walking companion, the March 4th demonstrations would be key: if students were mobilized to action, that would be a meaningful antidote to passivity. But the thing I most wanted to know—most want to hear right now—is that students want to be awake in the classroom, that they are receiving encouragement and support in noticing and interrogating their own assumptions, that they are acquiring the underlying skills of critical thinking needed to understand California’s economics or education policy, for instance, or the myriad other systems that weave our social fabric.

We weren’t really tempted to nostalgia. California’s schools may have been high-ranking when I attended in the 50s and 60s, but it isn’t as if they were hotbeds of critical thinking. To the contrary, our textbooks and course work had been shaped by the extreme caution imposed by the McCarthy era. Obedience was a supreme value. By the time I graduated high school, I had been punished many times for asking too many questions, refusing to take part in bomb drills and flag salutes, even for wearing clothes that were deemed “too Beatnik.”

I have an idea that my alienation—the remarkable degree to which my economically and socially marginal immigrant household diverged from the sunny California consensus of normalcy—was the key to my questioning nature, to the insatiable thirst for knowledge that persisted despite the character of much of my education. But I know you can’t draw straight cause-and-effect lines when it comes to human nature. On any given day, there was another alienated foreign-seeming child in the same classroom who memorized her textbooks, aced all tests, and generally behaved like a model citizen; or another who learned to sleep with his eyes open.

Here’s what I have observed from my time in classrooms: that the quality of attention varies in proportion to a student’s desire to learn. When students volunteer to be there, the talk is always better and deeper. Listening to my friend the professor, I saw that a far too large portion of his classroom is filled with students in whom that spark—the one that ignites the hunger to learn—was long ago extinguished in favor of an instrumental idea of education as something they had to endure as the ante into social position, or for the sake of a salary somewhere down the line. When I listen to our top education policymakers today propose things like teacher compensation tied to student test scores and a raft of other initiatives that result in “teaching to the tests” rather than whatever may spark students’ minds, I fear more of the same.

Like most autodidacts (and truth be told, many PhDs), my own education is uneven, only its spottiness is driven by curiosity and desire instead of the deficiencies of a preset curriculum. A few years ago, I decided to write a book on the subject of self-education. I was impressed by the long list of people who had excelled through the passionate pursuit of self-directed learning: Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen, their rivals Larry Ellison of Oracle and the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) of Apple; James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, C.L.R. James, Doris Lessing, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Richard Wright, Claire Booth Luce, David Ben-Gurion, Richard Avedon, Frank Zappa, Agatha Christie, Gore Vidal, Walt Disney, William Faulkner, Emma Goldman, Hazel Henderson, Ansel Adams, J.D. Salinger, George Bernard Shaw, August Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, and many, many more. I thought they (we) might be onto something.

I wrote a long introductory essay and several chapters profiling accomplished autodidacts. Everyone who has read them has enjoyed them immensely. But I haven’t been able to interest a publisher. Why? Turn on your irony detector for this one: I’ve been told I lacked the credentials, the platform, to pull it off. I’m thinking of publishing it online in installments. Let me know if you would be interested, and that will help me decide: arlene@arlenegoldbard.com.

So I really want my fellow Californians to reassert the value of education (and for that matter, the value of a public sector and all it can accomplish if integrity and accountability are strong). And I also really want something that exists regardless of rates of pay, tuition and budget: praise, honor and encouragement for the thirst for knowledge, the deep questioning, that is the essential ingredient of true learning, and therefore, of a true, sustainable democracy. And they are not one and the same.

If the schools don’t kindle the spark, young people may get it from the community artists and teaching artists who can still find ways to work in their communities, or thanks to the providential bounty of human resilience, through teaching themselves to make something out of their own alienation. Or they may not.

One way or the other, if we care about the future of democracy, we had better be thinking of ways to strike the match, igniting the spark of hunger for learning, welcoming and feeding the questioning flame. Like so many important social goods, leaving it to the experts won’t get it done.

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.