I still believe.

I'm a bit older and I hope wiser. Many thing in my life have changed, but one thing remains constant. I still believe in the liberal concept of community solutions to community problems. What has changed in the last thirty years is a loss of the sense of community and with that the growing belief that everyone is in this for themselves.

The current wave of conservative political popularity has put me and like thinkers on the outside of the discussion. Conservative thinking has thrived on an anti-government wave of reaction to unpopular and sometimes controversial laws and government supported social positions.

We have large numbers of people who do not trust the public organizations Americans have typically trusted. Home Schooling and private schools are the fall back to parents that mistrust the public schools. This has lead to a resentment toward supporting public schools, since they pay for them through their taxes, but do not get any benefit from them.

Many police and law enforcement organizations are mistrusted. Whole neighborhoods have fallen into the control of small gangs of thugs, because no one trusts the police to call them when they see a crime being committed. Citizens in these communities see the police as a greater threat than the gangsters that rule their neighborhoods.

Urban against rural. Race against race. Region against region. It seems that we are looking toward our differences in order to define ourselves in relation to others and in the end separate ourselves from what remains as a community.

We've allowed our society to become involved in a struggle for power. We are told that we are either red or blue. Conservative or liberal and Christian or professing another faith. We are told that we are Republican or Democrat. Are we truly feminist or chauvinist? And what does sexual orientation have to do with citizenery. The fact is that we are far more difficult to categorize than this but given the two party system, we don't have much choice.

We do not have a meaningful discourse on problems that affect all of us and are crying out for solutions and we need to do that. Returning to the social contract and trying to find community solutions to community problems is not going backwards. It is the basis for the founding of this country and it has been the method of assuring it's success. I have had enough of the "government is the problem" rhetoric. If the government is the problem than we have the duty and responsibility to fix it.

One way to fix it is to move the national dialogue out of the belt way and into the homes and communities of the rest of America. We need to send a message, as we did last November that this government is not satisfactory. We need to remind both parties that we are watching and will hold them responsible for their actions. The Democrats were not given a vote of confidence on November of 2006. They were given an opportunity and frankly I don't know if they are living up to expectations.

The climate is now warm with aspirations for the 2008 election. I see the candidates positioning themselves to secure the nomination by pandering to their base. It is a cliche, but the truth. The litmus test for both representatives of the major party is how far to the extreme they can go to secure their parties nomination and than how they hop over the fence to appeal to those of us in the middle so they can win a general election.
Take the statements they make now when they are running for nomination and compare their rhetoric when they are running in the general election. You wouldn't be wrong in assuming that your looking at the words of two different people.

The question in my mind is how is the candidate going to bring this nation together. He or she can do that by bringing the debate toward reality. Forget abortion, guns, gay marriage and flag burning. Let's talk about a new globalized foreign policy that truly represents the interests of the American People. I want to hear about reform of the heath care delivery system. Where are the plans to help individuals who are harmed, through no fault of their own, by globalization? What's the plan for reducing carbon based emissions? Lets debate a new approach to rampant drug use in this country and how we are going to rebuild our failing infrastructure. In other words, let's make the government the solution to our problem, by forcing a change in the focus of the government. The easiest and traditional way of doing this is to change the people in government.