How sweet the sound, but I’m having trouble singing this hymn.

We all love miracles. We spend billions on weight loss nostrums, sexual enhancement pills, baldness cures and other nonsense. The problem with reductive and illusory solutions is that they distract us from understanding and solving our real problems. I know nobody wins an election by telling truth to voters. We want feel-good mantras and we vote for people who tell us what we want to hear. Keep it simple, stupid. But are we really that stupid?

Since I’m not running, I’ll say a few things that no one wants to hear.

Taxes and regulation are not the only things businesspeople think about, they are one of many, along with education, the environment, workforce wellbeing, and healthcare. After years of being told that Vermont is a bad place to do business, Vermont businesses still manage to provide employment well above that of almost every other state. With just over 300,000 tax filers and inefficient rural infrastructure to maintain, we will always be a relatively high-taxed state. And, no, we don’t have the highest tax burden of any state in the union.

Taxes don’t necessarily need to rise or fall. That’s the wrong discussion, tax burden needs to be fairly apportioned and more wisely invested in common goals.

Yes, we do have substantial unfunded liabilities looming in our state pension and benefit funds that will need to be honored but amended going forward.

State government needs better leadership and management than it has had. It needs to be leaner, more efficient, and more transparent to the taxpayers who invest in it. It needs to have social, economic and environmental goals that are public and can be measured. The Governor must regularly report to the investor-taxpayers on how he or she is doing.

Government does not need to be dismembered by one-trick politicians who have never managed a complex business enterprise.

After the most disastrous national experiment in deregulation in modern times and the resulting economic meltdown that evaporated the jobs, savings and retirement accounts of so many American workers, is Vermont really going to revert to Reaganism?  Surely we learned that, like families and societies, businesses need rules by which to play. These rules need to be fair, consistent and free of politics. The idea that business freed from the bonds of regulation will always operate in the best interests of society is dead.

“I’m gonna reduce government, taxes and regulation is a hallowed but hollow mantra. Vermont needs good government and leadership that reflects our state motto “Freedom and Unity,” leadership that balances the freedom to live as one chooses and to create wealth with the obligations imposed by our choice to live together in communities.

I know this is irreverent and I also know that the verb “to pass” has come to mean “to die” and that the unspoken prepositional phrase that succeeds the infinitive in this context is “into the next world.” I still struggle, however, when hearing that someone has “passed” and still find myself filling in the blank of the missing object.

I think my struggle with this usage of the verb “to pass” comes from knowing how deeply our society has come to deny the aging process and death itself. We seek euphemisms to Disneyfy the image of an elderly person or the ultimate reality of their death.

It is not so in the rest of the world where death is more familiar and seen as the crowning achievement of old age. The wisdom accrued over a long and virtuous life is revered and integrated into the family and into society at large, rather than stowed away from the imagined relevance of daily life.

The old saying about “those not knowing history are condemned to repeat it” is true at the smaller scale of family as well. Every death is the culmination of a life of learning, observation and history. The great gift to children of having two generations of parents at hand to assist with the challenges of growing up is lost without easy access to older generations.  Isolating the elderly in institutions and death behind curtains is a sad adaptation. When I was young it was not so often the case. Many still died in their homes where a wake was then held.

In most other cultures, social status, reverence and authority grow with age. As the physical work life demands slow, the emotional and intellectual contribution to family and social life increases.

So why then does our post-industrial culture isolate us from the rare beauty of old age and an intimacy with death? Is it “anti-esthetical” as my wife’s 82-year old ballet teacher used to tell his young charges?  Does it remind us of our own aging and mortality? Do we imagine that exposure to old age and dying will offend our children? If so, we do them a disservice. They are not born with our fears. We impart them and so perpetuate the isolation of the elderly.

Encourage them to spend more time with old people and to be with them as they lie dying. Several friends have told me that the greatest gift in their lives as been to be with a loved one at the moment of their death.

We will never understand and achieve an appropriate healthcare system until we reacquaint ourselves with the beauty of old age and death.

This plutocratic Star Chamber approach to candidate selection and marketing has long been a part of our democracy, especially where a weakened press corps and a disengaged electorate don’t question and challenge candidates on their positions and proposed solutions.  The chosen candidate is easy to market to an electorate fearful and confused about the many economic and social ills facing them. He’s marketed less as a leader and source of ideas, and more  as a defense against voter’s inchoate fears of tax increases, expanded government, runaway costs, crazed legislators, liberal courts, trust funders, and immigrants or whatever the fear of the day happens to be.

There are several problems with shadow campaigns. One is that the candidates knighted by the Star Chamber seem to be mostly men. Two is that in order for the elders to maintain control over their candidate they must choose someone tractable who returns their calls, feels beholden and, by definition, is not a leader himself. It doesn’t do for the candidate to be full of ideas about how to initiate change or solve problems. That’s not his role. His appeal is to be a defense in a fatherly sort of way. But he must, above all, stay on the leash and be responsive to his patrons. To voters, he must sell himself as a backstop against an onslaught of new, bad things. Unfortunately, this usually includes diverse opinions, debate, compromise, testing creative solutions and risk. It is a defensive governing strategy and sells well to an electorate buffeted by fear and doubt.

Here in Vermont, our fears are probably worse than the dangers that actually beset us. If I lived in Florida, Michigan or California now, I’d be scared witless. As the larger states are whipped about on the roller coaster of massive economic fluctuations, corruption and budget and revenue imbalances, we in Vermont bounce along our roads full of familiar potholes and washboards and somehow muddle through, managing to stay at or near the top in many of the metrics that define wellbeing, if not always wealth. We have major challenges but they’re not going to be solved by continued years of defensive governing.

Vermont needs leadership now more than ever. Our challenges will only be met by experienced men and women leaders willing to attract, entertain, assess and deploy new ideas. Another guardian government will not take us anywhere. This time around, we Vermonters need to elect our own leader.

But we’re a blame culture, so it’s instructive to watch the game play out among friends, in our networks, and in the media. The political theatrics are predictable– self-righteous men haranguing lower officials, BP executives, regulators and, of course, the President.

BP executives, scripted by their attorneys and PR consultants, express earnest sorrow and empathy, but choose their words carefully from briefing books to evade further liability, and then, finally, the righteous anger of the powerless people in the Gulf, holding everyone in power accountable for the environmental tragedy that has beset them and crippled their economy and seascape.

We have become adept at blaming, suing, and demanding retribution of everyone but ourselves. Teachers are to blame for the steep decline in educational achievement and illiteracies of all sorts. Business is at fault for environmental degradation. The financial industry is at fault for bringing the Western economy to a standstill and wiping out trillions in personal savings. Foreign workers and illegal aliens are causing unemployment. Mexican cartels and Afghan poppy farmers are behind our drug problem. We die because doctors can’t keep us alive. We’re obese because our food supply is industrialized. Crime is rampant because judges don’t jail enough people. Our nation is in debt because our chosen officials keep giving us what we demand. The list is endless. Someone must be held to account for everything that’s not right with us. There’s no room left for the inherent dangers of life on earth, not even death. In all these cases, someone must be found guilty and we must have retribution.

It’s too painful to understand our own role in these disasters and to make mitigating changes in our own lives that diminish the problems. Is the truth of our complicity too sad and to daunting to confront? We are the demanding market for oil, mortgages, junk food, drugs, McMansions, cheap labor & consumer goods, feel-good educations, and cure-all healthcare. We imagine crime-free streets and celebrate massive economic inequities and executive compensation packages, anyone one of which might fund the solution to a town’s homelessness and hunger problems.

It’s sad to watch so many take aim so quickly and with no introspection on the most powerful man in the country because, frankly, he’s not powerful enough to address all our ills at once. I wish Obama had had the courage to tell truth to power as they say and simply explain to us that no one knows how to stop the flow of oil into the gulf.

But the fact is that our insatiable appetites have opened a Pandora’s Box of new risks on earth with which we’ll have to learn to live. Durable solutions will only emerge when we understand our own role in society’s ills.

Gubernatorial candidate and second in command of the State for the last eight years Brian Dubie has announced he’s going to change that and, “get Vermont moving again.” Pardon my asking, but where was this energy for the last eight years and will Vermonters give him a Republican legislature to do so? I think not.

I also hear it said that, among the six declared candidates, there is little leadership experience and skill. I disagree here as well. At least two of the candidates have records of achievement and leadership that deserve our serious consideration.

We Vermonters are by tradition wary and distrustful of risk and change. Although I understand the rationale for trying to maintain the status quo, I believe ultimately it’s as self-defeating as change for change’s sake. We forget that nothing is forever and what has been done can also be undone, except perhaps in deepwater oil drilling. The world around us is in a constant state of flux, socially, economically, environmentally, and culturally, offering us both opportunity and risk. But because we haven’t done any formal central planning in Vermont since the Snelling administration, we lack the knowledge and resources to assess risk and opportunity that could lead us to more strategic decision making. Add to this weak leadership and we’re reduced to ideological swordplay.

If history teaches us anything, this next election will determine our progress for the next eight years. Tradition usually gives Vermont’s leaders four two-year terms in office. If we had a four-year election cycle like most states, a leader would at least have three of them to plan and govern.

Finally, candidates need to talk seriously about something other than their vague promises for creating jobs. Vermonters know that governments rarely create jobs except when they themselves hire and most Vermonters agree we don’t need more government jobs. We need more effective, efficient, transparent and accountable government. We need a strong private sector driven by Vermont’s native assets guided by clear, consistent tax and regulatory policies that enable economic growth while setting and enforcing clear limits on behavior that is destructive of the economy, the social fabric or the environment. We need forecasting and planning. And, finally, we need leadership that attracts new ideas, and can find and pursue a middle way that breaks Vermont’s political logjam.

We are in control of our own destiny, but only if we engage and vote.

My suspicions were confirmed last month when a study by the Pew Research Center declared that the cellular system now carries more data than voice messages; that means more text messages than human conversations.

When I was sent away to school at fourteen, I had to write a weekly letter home on paper. I was allowed to call in an emergency, or once a month, whichever occurred first. My call usually coincided with my father’s forgetting to send my $15 a month allowance.

I miss the fun on a rainy summer afternoon of listening to Gladys Farr and Glenna Bumps whispering town gossip on our four-party line, at least until my annual attack of hay fever made that impossible.

Forty-odd years later, misguided environmentalists wanting to save trees and imagining that we would no longer need to write on paper or print anything, invented email and the postal system began delivering nothing but catalogs to burn in your woodstove.

I adopted email with pleasure, even though they didn’t teach typing at my fancy prep school. Somewhat earlier, the FCC had decided that regulating a price-gouging monopoly was old hat and phone calls dropped from several dollars to several cents, so I just began to call people I liked and talk with them. This worked well, though my Grandmother continued to answer her phone saying, “Hello, who is this? Oh, Billy, nice to hear from you. Well, I don’t want to run up your long distance bill, so good-bye,” followed by a dial tone.

My children no longer answer the expensive cellphones I provide them with, nor do they answer my emails. They don’t even text me anymore, because I haven’t figured out how to respond. I do hear monthly, however, from Verizon with a whopping bill.

My daughter is an honors student at a difficult college. I tried once to text her, and it took me thirteen minutes. My last bill showed 950 text messages on her number. At my keying speed, that would be 200 hours a month. When does she study, sleep, or go to class?  She, of course, can text much faster than I can and presumably can do so while doing the other three things. According to Pew, the average young person sends 1500 messages a month… and we wonder about school quality?

So, in anticipation of the next big leap backwards in communications, I’m searching eBay for a telegraph key. Please feel free to text me with your comments

Good parents understand the challenges and difficult choices in life and don’t obsess about making their children or themselves feel good, but focus rather on helping them make the better choices, many of which can be counter-intuitive and painful to a child.

But in our generation, a parenting trend has re-emerged that inspires some parents to try and create a perfect childhood. This often comes at the expense of the child because of a misplaced understanding of how children develop their own sense of self-worth. The parent manages play dates, obsessive sport and cultural activities, helicoptering into schools and providing competitions or assessments in which the child always excels, even when he or she knows they didn’t.

I remember when I took my older boys and their two pets to a local town pet show. Our goat Otis and our rabbit Texaco both came home with blue ribbons. My boys noted warily that so did every other animal at the show. The desire to send every child home a winner devalued all the blue ribbons the organizers awarded. I remember thinking that my boys would have gotten more credible pleasure from a 3rd place win for either animal.

Turn to nature, if you want to learn parenting skills. There, offspring are pushed out of nests to learn to fly, left on their own when they come of age, but throughout are given the basic elements of parenting: learning, security and nutrition until it is time for them to be independent and fend for themselves.

I remember my own parents with mixed emotions, as do many of us I suspect. There were aspects of my upbringing that were magical and others that were painful. The gradual recognition that my parents carried within them the human imperfections that their parents imparted to them, and then, that many of those flaws persist within me today, is painful. It’s especially difficult to observe a behavior in one of my own children that I bestowed on them by my own example when I disapprove of it within myself.

On occasion, when I remember my mother not at her best, I remember her own mother and imagine my mother as a young girl coping with the harsh and sometimes loveless childhood in which the cult of the male child left her emotionally abandoned. It is this memory that triggers a deep sense of forgiveness and enables again the memories of her that were the magic of my own childhood.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for us to take to heart is that our children will be who we are, not who we tell them to be. So this Mother’s Day, let’s greet, visit or remember our mothers with compassion and joy for they had mothers too.

There are at least three languages among us. After the initial glances and assessments of one another, the ice is broken, first in Arabic, then in French. The Saudi speaks no French, so we take turns updating him in English. The Moroccans are fluent in French and Arabic and speak a bit of English. Nada, the girl next to us, speaks all three languages with fluency.  Most of the discussion is in French. This is all beyond the point though.

Nada, 18, tells us she spent a disappointing semester in a New England high school hoping to refine her English, math and sciences. Disappointing, she said, only because she was so far ahead of her American peers in everything but English. She liked America, but was surprised at how little Americans her age respected and valued their educational opportunities.

Our guide in Fez, is a woman named Saida. She’s an observant Sunni who does not wear the traditional veil, is literate in four languages and very well educated. She takes us to Karaouin University, started in the 9^th century by a wealthy woman from Tunisia. It is the oldest University in the world. The central building can accommodate 20,000 people at once and has 14 entrance gates from the old city. We visit the Mek-Nes Mosque built by the Berbers in the 12^th century and a madrassa in Fez.

Saida speaks thoughtfully about her beautiful religion and its deep commonality with and respect for Judaism and Christianity. I begin to understand my own deep misperceptions about Islam.  Saida points out many commonalities among the three religions and one more enlightened one — the fundamentalists of all three who advocate killing one another will all go to the same hell.

At home in the U.S. we’ve grown arrogant and lazy. We no longer teach the languages and literature of other cultures in our schools. We’re reluctant to travel except in cruise ships or to island resorts where we meet only ourselves. As we lose our knowledge, we lose our relevance in the world. Islam teaches humility and gratitude for all things, while we believe ourselves unique.

We’ll never really fix our schools until we fix ourselves. Our schools and the standards they set are simply reflections of our own values. We talk about money and teachers, but say nothing about the children whom we’ve raised in our image. In many undeveloped countries, a family might sell their home to educate their children while we complain about taxes.

There is much we can do to improve our educational system, but first we must reflect in our own lives a respect for learning and a curiosity about the great world beyond our living rooms.

These soldiers of Christ, far too many of whom have for centuries turned a blind eye to the sexual predation of children in the faith, now oppose the very comforts that Christ spent his brief time on earth providing to the poor and suffering. One might think that an appropriate penance for some of the bishops’ own bad behavior in covering up the sins of their own would be good works for those with less.

Thank God the nuns get it. In direct opposition to the bishops, they came out in favor of the U.S. health care bill. It is they, after all, who not only care for the poor, but get their spiritual sustenance from helping others in need: raising orphan children, helping young men and women in trouble find their way back into society, teaching, nursing and caring for the ill or infirm, tending to the dying, feeding and caring for the poor, in short doing God’s work. They also run hospitals and clinics, living among and ministering to the refuse of a health care system, a system that works well enough for those of us with means and the bishops and cardinals.

Throughout the volatile history of the Catholic Church, nuns from many religious communities have suffered the edicts, politics and even retribution of the church’s male hierarchy. To add insult to injury, the Vatican is sending an investigative emissary from Rome to America to gather data on these rebellious nuns. Seems they may have drifted too far from the teachings of their all-male church hierarchy in Rome and too close to Christ’s own work and teaching on Earth. The sad thought that the church feels it must investigate the shrinking communities of nuns only adds pathos to the church’s deteriorating position among its own faithful.

Maybe it is time to re-examine gender issues within the church. In fact, the world’s great religions that generally exclude women from their hierarchies seem to expend an inordinate amount of time trying to keep them in their place rather than focusing on them as part of a community of faith and works.

It took great courage for American Catholic nuns to follow the teachings of Christ rather than the authority of the bishops, to follow their own conscience and support a long-overdue bill that would expand the poor’s access to our health care system. The bill has finally passed, allowing us to begin catching up with the rest of the world. The nuns, who often pick up the pieces of our broken health care system, will at least have weighed in on the side of their faith.

Though we may feel like victims of the recent experiment in capitalism without borders, and to a degree we are, we are also subject to the normal rise and fall of economic cycles. Regardless of the cause, we must look for ideas that enable us to do more with less.

For some, the very real need to improve efficiencies and lower educational costs through consolidation is threatening to their view of community. As an alternative, might it be more efficient in some towns to consider consolidation within the community rather than without?

I’ve lived in small Vermont towns most of my life, attended town meetings and watched town fathers advocate for new police headquarters, fire houses, town halls, EMT facilities, town sheds, elementary schools, library additions, community centers and the like.

Imagine Vermont architects designing a single centrally heated community center that accommodates all community services needed by a town of under 5000 people, of which there are well over 200.  The building would be designed for energy-efficiency, shared overheads and multi-use and would be open and in use 24 hours a day, 365 days a year instead of lying fallow and expensive for much of the day or year. It would have a “town services façade” and an opposing “community center” façade to isolate emergency vehicle traffic from the playground, farmer’s markets, community gardens and commons.

Administrative overheads like phones, networks, security, and office equipment would be shared instead of duplicated. A smart grid would parse energy, lights and heat round the clock as needed.

Classrooms would be community rooms in the evening for zoning, design review, select board and AA meetings. Students would see how town government and infrastructure work, an onsite laboratory for learning civics. They would not only learn how the town’s policing and emergency response systems work but would see them in action and might eventually intern. The auditorium would be designed for: school assemblies, town meetings, community theater and arts performances; the gym for: phys ed., games, and community yoga classes.

Of greatest benefit, however, would be the significant reduction in a town’s budget by creating and using an energy efficient cluster of shared community spaces used throughout the days and seasons, a town hall for the next century.

This week we went to town meeting and heard from our own town’s various fiefdoms advocating for this and that new expense, but we must consider bold new ideas in our communities and in our capital to weather this down turn and maintain vital community services.

Too often, the economic challenges that broadside us result in a dispute over revenue and spending, taxes and budget cuts, when the best way forward may be simply to pause and ask those  in our communities whose job it is to innovate, for new ideas and practical ways to do more with less.