(if I were the) King of the Forest

It seems to me the most important thing we can teach our children, future drivers, riders, and walkers — and future employers and employees and leaders and teachers and neighbors, and future voters and politicians — is courtesy. We must all share the roads. We must all share in society. Your duty in driving, and in life, should be to minimize the chaos and disruption in your wake as you strive toward your destination. Your guiding principle should be: always assume the other guy is going to do something careless or stupid. If that means sometimes ceding your right-of-way — what have you lost but a bit of pride?

It takes money to make money. Especially here in the Silicon Valley, where high rewards come from high risks bankrolled by big bucks.

This essay – minus the two paragraphs in the middle that refer to this project – was one of the first essays submitted for publication to the San Jose Mercury News. It was not published.
Note that when this was written the entire concept of blogging – and its potential for bringing other voices to […]

In the fall of 1996 a friend of mine ran for congress as a Republican in a predominantly Democratic district. In addition to having to overcome the demographics, he was also fighting an entrenched incumbent and the disaster of Bob Dole’s lackluster presidential campaign. Predictably, he lost the election.

While working occasionally on the campaign I began to pay attention to some of the biases built into our electoral system. This essay describes one such bias, the franking privilege, and proposes an alternative.

The general state of race-relations in America has recently been highlighted nationally by President Clinton’s “Dialogue on Race”, and in California by ballot propositions like 187 (limiting government benefits to illegal immigrants) and 209 (eliminating state-sponsored affirmative-action). The desire for an unemotional and realistic conversation on race — where we stand, where we are headed, and where we want to be — is noble and desirable. It seems, however, that our initial attempts have been thwarted as much by the terms of the conversation as by the subject itself: just as the underlying context, assumptions, and forms of historical discrimination were largely defined by its beneficiaries (to whom ‘race-relations’ were a closed issue), the underlying context, assumptions, and forms of the fight against discrimination — and, more generally, of our discussions about race — have been largely defined by those to whom ‘race-relations’ have historically meant ‘race-based oppression’ — to whom ‘race-relations’ were very much an open issue and a dominant factor of their lives. While this is understandable, and perhaps even just, it almost ensures that racial difference is viewed and debated as a chasm to be crossed — or into which to fall — rather than as a boundary to be transcended.