As long as anger, paranoia and misinformation drive our political debate, there are unhinged souls among us who will feel justified in turning to violent remedies for imagined threats.
Like gods, we have created a new universe called cyberspace that contains great good and ominous evil. We do not know yet if this new dimension will produce more monsters than marvels, but it is too late to go back.
Experience shows us that most people's votes are based on their biases, not on objective reality. Elections are a collective gut reaction. That any good comes of it at all is the miracle of democracy.
If a gigantic asteroid were barreling toward impact with our planet, you can bet there would be at least a few members of Congress who would insist on leaving it alone, either because they would see it as a warning shot from the Almighty or because a mining company with a savvy team of lobbyists had laid claim to the big rock.
The Tea Party folks may be sincere, loyal citizens, but their notions about how the economy works are exactly that: mere notions. Their core notion is that government needs to do nothing more than get out of the way of business in order for the economy to boom and bloom.
Ah, to be a conservative climate change denier. While real scientists must do all the research and engage in heated debates about just how bad things are going to be, the deniers can rest easy in the bliss of willful ignorance.
From China and India to Turkey and Brazil, when women have gotten access to education, to family planning and to a vital place in the economy, greater prosperity has followed. And when women are free to speak and learn, they temper the extremes of ideology and fanaticism and raise sons who are less likely to become human bombs.
Even if you're drawing a cartoon and exaggerating, you want to capture something true about the person.
Global warming is the foreboding thunder in the distance. Ocean acidification is the lightning strike in our front yard, right here, right now.
I am no technophobe. I like being able to calibrate communication, depending on the situation - texting for the simple and immediate; email for business or when I want to put some lag time into the exchange; Twitter to promote something; Facebook to draw a crowd.
When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.
I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.
One of the least appealing aspects of modern presidential candidates is that, to avoid saying anything that might prove to be an embarrassing, costly blunder, they cling to a rigid set of talking points that reveal as little as possible about what they really think and who they really are.
Our vision of war is probably too influenced by the biggest one of all, World War II, where the forces of evil were so unambiguous and so relentless that there was no choice but to commit to total war and to demand unconditional surrender. Seldom, though, is it quite that clear cut.
It is really no surprise that, in a media world that has been so compromised by an invasion of political partisans and inarticulate airheads with communications degrees, a fake journalist can seem more trustworthy than the real thing.
The appalling reality in American politics today is that, when ideology and money mix, truth is a mere inconvenience.
Twitter was a mere prototype in 2006; now, many of us have become adept at saying all we have to say in 140 characters.
Yes, the disruption of the Internet can be blamed for the destruction of the business model that once made journalism a thriving, well-paying enterprise, but it has also created an array of new tools for reporting. Somebody will eventually figure out how to make online newspapers profitable - I hope.
We need to work for a day when police shootings are rare and not the stuff of our daily news.
I always figured that I was one new editor away from unemployment.
