Another year of Action Speaks is over, but our topics live on. Health care reform is still beating, bless its heart, even as the House seemed to throw 'the women' overboard in the rough seas of negotiation. Suburban commuting seems to have a temporary respite from $5.00 a gallon gas prices, but very few believe that changes in our land use patterns will not eventually have to transpire. China's economy is passing us as if we are standing still (We are, it seems) and both the Left and the Right are mobilizing forces for not only the health care reform, but over the Afghanistan war and already for the 2010 elections.

Does anyone else think that while we are living no longer beyond are means, we are living beyond our present? It seems that we don't live in 'now' time anymore but in the future, driven by engines of anxiety and 24 hour news sources. No sooner do we finish one election than we are on to another. No soon do we finish one baseball season (Yea Yanks!) than we are talking Hot Stove League. No sooner are we finishing one meal, when we are asking what are we eating for the next.

I'm not immune to this. I started my list of possible dates for next year's Action Speaks even before I started this year's and the list is starting to grow. I'm reading a great new book that is stimulating my thinking. It's Rebecca Solnit's; A Paradise Made in Hell. The book is a description of five disasters of the last century and the human response to them. Very briefly... She says that these crises or catastrophes rather than unleashing the 'dark' forces of human nature, as the media often portrays, through coping with an altruistic and humanitarian side of us emerges. The philosophical and political implications of this, she points out are great. Ms Solnit, whose books are all worth reading, says that we must set up institutions that allow for this part of ourselves to flourish and to find ways to encourage rather than to discourage cooperation, interdependency and civic engagement.

Not a bad way to go into the Thanksgiving vacation, huh?

Marc Levitt