Quite a few things, it turns out.  A president who is clearly intelligent, thoughtful, articulate and seemingly caring must be granted certain allowances for what might be called moral or political failures.  For example, if a cleric in Yemen speaks out against Al Queda, risking his own life, and then meets with his adversaries to debate, and is accidentally killed along with the terrorists by a US drone, the cleric is collateral damage, you know?  The president’s spokesman today called the targeted killing by drone program “legal, ethical and wise.”  

If we like the president we can say “bad shit happens in war.”    Or we can all agree that collateral damage is terrible.   The last thing we’d do is call for the return of the Nobel Peace Prize he received for not being a torture-endorsing, pre-emptive war waging faith-based cowboy.  On the other hand, if we dislike the president we can say just about anything, there are a hundred things that spring to mind.

I know, I know.  The world is complex so let’s just agree that it’s OK to disagree and that we also must hunt down and kill our enemies wherever we find them, by any means necessary.  And while killing them other people will be killed and that killing also produces consequences.  OK, OK.  

How, for example, does it benefit anyone if I once more observe that Thomas Jefferson, the Author of Liberty and one of our most revered idealist presidents, a man who inherited a fortune and died deep in debt because of his love for imported luxury, was tormented as he neared death that his debts prevented him from freeing hundreds of human beings he owned?   After all, it was Mr. Jefferson who so famously stated the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.  Why carp over the fate of a few hundred he held as property in perpetuity, or their descendants, some of whom, it turned out, were his own flesh and blood?   I carp, I carp, I carp.  Carpe diem, better that than this fish mouthed carping of mine.  

Why this envious need to attack true greatness?   Sure, Jefferson had many slaves.  Sure, he went bankrupt because virtually everything on his inherited estate was imported from Europe and he had expensive tastes.   Sure, it must be admitted, almost two hundred years after his death, he did own a beautiful slave named Sally, the half-sister of his beloved wife who died young, and he had at least three children with her over a period of many years.   Why this envious need to attack true greatness?  

I don’t know, I take it for granted.  Like the fact that the rich will get richer.  Thus it has always been and thus it will ever be.  Why this foam on my lips when I read that Bank of America paid nothing to the U.S. treasury in 2010 and received an almost two billion dollar “tax rebate” that year?  What can I do about this?  Why do I take the word of an avowed Socialist on this issue when everyone knows Socialism is a short step away from Communism, a proven evil?  These people hate our freedom.  Do I hate our freedom?  

What we take for granted, I suppose, is that this is a rational world where things are done for thoughtful and sincerely debated reasons, reasons that lead to the greater common good.   If a drone is sent to kill someone thousands of miles away, or down the block, for that matter, there is a good reason for it, most likely.  It’s better than putting the lives of our young men and women at risk by placing them in war zones, right?  If Bank of America, or General Electric, pays no tax on billions in profit it is because they are creating jobs, or some equally compelling good reason.  What next, disputing the right of their executives to be paid millions of dollars a year? Just because Thomas Jefferson had a long sexual affair with a woman he owned, and treated their children kindly as preferred house slaves, that doesn’t mean he believed any the less the self-evident truth that is a beacon to the world and a keystone of human liberty and democracy.

For my part, clearly, I spend part of almost every day tormented about things I am helpless to influence.  The things I can influence for the good often remain uninfluenced as I fret about other things, as I am fretting now.  I tap the keys, glance at the screen, correct typos and other mistakes.  I reshape the sentences until they become clear and strong enough to stand on their own spindly legs.   If I march the proper sentences into a good paragraph it feels like a job well-done.   This too is an illusion.  No matter how well I put them together, make them flow one into the next, create a stream of thought and feeling a reader can paddle in, there is no job done without pay, only a hobby horse giddyapped on by a willfully blind man letting opportunity in the real world fly past him.  

I wonder if the young Thomas Jefferson, who most biographers note made a daily practice of whipping his riding horses bloody, the only outward show in his life that this thoughtful, soft-spoken patrician was not the complete master of his passions, whipped his hobby horse as a lad.  Practice makes perfect, one notes, as I rattle on here.  I suspect he may have.  Not that I judge him, mind you.  I probably would have done the same, if I’d been him.

The only alternative to this life of sour contemplation is a life of action.  After all, am I not the fellow who showed a nine year-old how to operate garageband and left her, with no further instruction, with a seven year-old to spontaneously create a music track?  And did they not, with only slight post-production help from this same adult, come up with a very neat little exuberantly improvised soundtrack within a few minutes?  

Yes, yes, I know it’s like writing that is truly nothing until monetized, but still, it should not be taken for granted.  After all, not everyone is trying to be the change they’d like to see in the world.  What we take for granted is the right to take a bow.  It is not time for any bows yet, nor is there any stage nor anyone to curtsy modestly before as the cheers descend.