Many politicians, legal experts, psychologists, celebrities and pundits have wanted the world to know that they fervently desire what's best for you. We've been glad to put you on national television -- live if possible -- playing on a backyard swing set or holding your pet rabbit named "Esperanza." Hope for your future has become very important to us all.

Frankly, kids your age usually aren't interesting to those of us in the media profession. They may suffer from danger and deprivation, but the chances are slim that a spotlight will fall on their unimportant little lives. What afflicts their daily existence is apt to be too downbeat and humdrum for prime time. There's no tragic shipwreck or high-profile legal battle to recount, just ongoing social conditions. Kind of boring.

The peculiar sickness of California politics has been apparent for some time. Peter Schrag's book Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future examines that illness closely.

Not that it is startlingly new -- all friends of California have been muttering for years now: "You fools, you fools. You had the finest system of public education in America, perhaps even the world. From kindergarten through graduate school, you had great schools, and you just threw them away -- the schools and everything else government used to do here. All because you wanted property tax relief."

At the heart of this matter is what I am grateful to have learned from Aesthetic Realism, founded by America’s great poet and historian Eli Siegel, about the fight in every human being – in me – between respect for the world and contempt for it. “The deepest desire of every person,” Mr. Siegel explained, “is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.” This desire is the source of art, kindness, truth, good sense in life and economics. He also explained the ugliest thing in people, causing every injustice, from a sarcastic insult, a “little lie,” to the deadly forms of crime, racism, war. It is contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

In the early 1990’s the Greens were a growing force with a strong core

Hello, my name is Paul Dumouchelle. I am Secretary of Darby Creek Association, a local volunteer group of 150 citizens living throughout Central Ohio. Our mission is to preserve, protect and restore the entire Darby Creek Ecosystem. Darby Creek Association was founded in 1972.