It’s hard to think of a tragedy worse than that which befell Elena Veach last week. A talented teacher and wife of Bloomington’s New Tech High School principle Alan Veach, Elena, just 27, fell after giving birth to her son. A victim of genetics gone bad, Elena passed from a congenital heart defect; too soon, and too tragic.

But not without a legacy. For now Elena’s family is struggling to raise funds for which to pay her posthumous medical bills. Bills accrued during her life, due now that it’s over and because it’s over.

A bake sale of sorts, for the past health needs of a vibrant individual. Covering the obligations that she, in death, was forced to lay on the feet of her survivors. Here, in the most prosperous nation on earth.

Petitions to government are older than democracy itself. The 13th-century British Magna Carta declared: "If we, our chief justice, our officials, or any of our servants offend in any respect against any man, or transgress any of the articles of the peace or of this security, and the offence is made known to four of the said twenty-five barons, they shall come to us -- or in our absence from the kingdom to the chief justice -- to declare it and claim immediate redress."

Redress. The righting of a wrong, the tortuous equalization of one man's transgression against another. Furthered by the 17th century British Bill of Rights, which steadfastly declared: "That is the right of subjects to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal."

Petition. The sending up of a complaint, from a locality, a municipality, a community, to a government more catholic than that, in an effort to obtain relief.

It may be that my generation was the last allowed outside. Born in 1964, the final year of the baby boom, mine was the ultimate generation whose parents either didn’t care about, or were blissfully ignorant of, the real-world’s dangers.

As a 6 year old, I broke my first bone on a jungle-gym that today would violate every tenet of the Geneva conventions. Sharp, metal and covered in rust, it was a geodesic monolith, buried in the school playground, lacerating every kid who dared climb upon it.

Which was all of us.

For my seventh Christmas, my parents bought me a backyard trampoline. As far as I could tell, its purpose was no higher than that of a personal abattoir. Replete with exposed bolts and a brace of jagged springs, the trampoline daily extracted pounds of bloody flesh from both myself and every other kid in the neighborhood.

I ran across a graph the other day, posted on an Internet forum. It showed, in stark form, the juxtaposition between what we (meaning our federal government) spent last year on research and development of differing types of energy vs. what we spent prosecuting the war in Iraq.

Along the bottom of the graph were little centimeter-high bars representing solar, nuclear, coal and other fossil fuel research. And then there was another bar, about 2 feet tall (at least on my Apple laptop), and that bar was Iraq. (See Solar Power Rocks).

The war in Iraq is costing us about $120 billion dollars a year. In contrast, we spend less than $500 million a year on finding ways of powering the world without having to resort to using oil, purchased from people who hate us.

Lately I've been feeling like a pre-creepy Michael Jackson. You know, the dude with the Afro who could Moonwalk.

The planning and the damage done

Half a century ago, California realized it had created a problem. Through an intensive system of government suburban-automotive subsidies, lawmakers had created an intensely lucrative market for land speculation -- far beyond the traditional cores of California's cities. In the hopes of efficiently channeling rural residents into the city for shopping, cultural activities and employment, they began building an elaborate network of automotive highways.

And, in the hope of building that rural population base, which would come into the city and thereby vitalize both, they extended traditional urban services, such as water and sewer, far beyond the city center.

The result was a love-letter to the God of Unintended Consequences. The highways, instead of funneling people into the cities, became a backwards conduit out of the cities, particularly for middle class and affluent white Americans.

Civitas’ title is also that of a 2005 monograph by James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler’s thesis was simple: as a species we are reluctant to abandon any path we’ve set down, once we’ve made the commitment to set down the path.

And no matter how clear it becomes that the path leads to nowhere.

Indeed, we’ve romanticized the image of the stick-to-it hero who, damn the torpedoes, forges full-speed-ahead. And we’ve demonized those who, once committed to a path, subsequently choose another -- John Kerry wasn’t lionized for keeping his head up and alert, he was criticized for being a “flip-flopper.”

Which is nonsense, of course. The flip-side of staying the course is bullheaded stubbornness. Once, when criticized for changing his position on monetary policy, the great economist John Maynard Keynes shot backl, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Long before they set words to paper, humans drew maps -- pictures that told a thousand stories about human’s spatial relationship to the world and to each other. A collection of boundaries, some real, like lakes and rivers, some mythological, like Dante’s cosmology, and some cultural.

And some boundaries, political.

The boundaries on a map describe a philosophy of meaning. Things that mean one thing on one side of a boundary can mean another thing altogether on the other side of the boundary. And when the boundaries depicted are political boundaries, the map describes places where politics change.

A map defines a city, it shows us where the spatial extent of the city begins and where it ends. The municipal boundary tells us, “Here the city, be,” and where the city not be. Where politics change from the rural, to the urban – and vice-versa.

It's three days until the 2008 primary election, an election that promises to be one of the more exciting ones we've had here in Indiana, since at least 1968 for us Democrats, when Robert Kennedy came here to square off against Eugene McCarthy.

But that was a different kind of primary from the one we're seeing here today. It was a primary that started in the fall of 1967 with the incumbent Lyndon Johnson intending to run for re-election. But McCarthy soon thereafter launched a primary challenge to Johnson, entering the race as an anti-war dark horse in November 1967.

Kennedy waited until March 1968 to enter the primary, in a move that enraged McCarthy's supporters while simultaneously creating the spectacle of not one, but two high-profile Democrats challenging an incumbent Democratic president. It proved too much for Johnson who, seeing the writing on the wall, exited his bid for re-election just two weeks after Kennedy announced his bid for the ticket.

And so they came, Kennedy and McCarthy to Indiana where, on April 4, Kennedy delivered his famous speech in Indianapolis, at what was to be a bread-and-butter campaign stop, and which turned instead into one of the most famous extemporaneous eulogistical evocations in history.

Oil managed to hit over $117 a barrel yesterday, nearly twice as expensive as it had been as early as just a year-and-a-half ago. And it shows no signs of slowing down its meteoric rise in price.

And as it rises, it's bringing the prices of virtually everything else with it, like a giant trawler net scooping up the ocean's bounty, and lifting it out of reach.

The "green revolution" of the 1960s increased average crop yields per acre by three times. It did that through the miracle of petrochemicals. Fossil fuels, not animal or human labor, are the primary inputs to farming today.

On average, for every calorie of food we grow, we have to burn 10 calories of fossil fuels.

Oil is more than just the fuel that powers our cars, our trucks and our airplanes. It is the fuel that powers us. It is the food that we eat.

Political parties are private clubs, unions of like-minded individuals who combine resources, energy and ideology to help increase the chances of election to public office persons who embody the institutional character, values and qualities of the party membership.

It’s fashionable for some to claim themselves above the hew-and-fray of partisan politics. Perhaps, in the sense of not wanting to belong to any club that would have them, some claim independence from any particular political organization, or ideology. “I vote for the best candidate, not along party lines” goes the refrain; an expression of implicit superiority sometimes boosted in its rhetorical legitimacy with an added flourish, such as “I’ve voted for both Republicans and Democrats,” uttered not in shame, but pridefully.

Private clubs, yes, but private clubs with ridiculously lax standards of membership. In a few states, membership to one of the clubs requires you do nothing more than declare on a form to which club you wish to belong, making you a “registered” Democrat, or a “registered” Republican (for example).

In other states, membership is even more lax. In Indiana, for example, membership in one or the other club is as much a state of mind as anything else. But, even then, there are some rules.