I was only half-listening each time, but I heard a couple times on the radio the assertion that what Americans want for health insurance is choice.

Well, here's one American who doesn't particularly want choice, or, more exactly, choice isn't something I want to need. What I want is what I had for my adult life up to retirement: decent coverage I didn't have to worry about.

As a student, I had access to student health services. I was convinced the student health service at the University of Illinois, Urbana -- as opposed to the excellent veterinary-care clinic -- was part of an AMA plot to turn young Americans against socialized medicine. Still, the health service was good enough for my undergraduate needs, and when I got older and started earning a bit of money, I supplemented the health service with Carle Clinic, at the time, a real HMO: a low-cost health-maintenance organization.

As a university faculty member and indirect employee of first the State of Illinois and then the State of Ohio, I participated in university health plans. I got insurance automatically, as part of my compensation package. The coverage was good; the co-pays reasonable -- and when an insurance company bureaucrat got between me and my physician, I had the phone number of a university bureaucrat whose primary job was running interference for university employees trying to get payments from our insurance company.

The system was imperfect, but pretty efficient.

Shopping, period, is not my idea of a good time -- yeah, I'm a guy -- and high-risk shopping for something complicated and important is my idea of a very bad time. Shopping was also not part of my job; nor was arguing with 20-something punk insurance company flunkies. Time spent on health insurance would have been time I wasn't doing my job; as far as my employer and I were concerned, it would have been nonproductive, wasted time.

Now I'm retired, and my time is my own; but I'm close enough to death to really value that time, and I'm more anxious than ever to avoid shopping for insurance, reading policies, and/or fighting with corporate "minicrats" professionally obligated to try to deny coverage.

Fortunately, I've got Medicare -- or, I think I do (I forgot to make quarterly payments automatic). And I have a pension and a secondary policy through my pension plan.

All Americans should have it as good, or better. Ideally, from this point of view, we'd have a National Health Service, or at least single-payer health coverage. In any event, what I want and what I think we all need isn't particularly choice but one system that is flexible, simple, automatic, and -- including considerations of nonwasted time -- efficient.

Richard D. Erlich is professor emeritus at Miami University, currently living in Ventura County, California.

To put the matter in an old-fashioned, satiric, but nonsexist way, AMERICANS ARE PUPPIES!!! Putting that assertion into respectable language: Few Americans are willing to take personal risks, even small ones, for liberty and decency.

The Declaration of Independence lists life as the first of the "unalienable rights" that we humans establish governments to preserve, and the Preamble to the US Constitution lists defense as one of the purposes of the US government.

Still, it was and remains misleading when Presidents Bush and Obama put quite so much emphasis on their job to protect the American people. The President is commander in chief of the military forces of the United States, and the faithful execution of the Presidential office includes protecting Americans, but the President isn't commander-in-Chief of the United States, and the President's first job isn't to protect Americans but America: "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" (Article II).

The Declaration of Independence has life as a right, but follows it with rights to "liberty and the pursuit of happiness." We humans establish governments to for protection but also to secure liberty and to create the political space to pursue our own good in our own ways. If you want self-protection as the central justification for government, don't go to Thomas Jefferson but to Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan (1651).

Without relying on arguments from divine authority or restricting himself to kings, Hobbes establishes something like Divine Right for any sovereign. Hobbes gives us a creation myth where to protect themselves from each other -- to get out of a state of nature where human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" -- humans established governments to end a war of all against all. As the price of safety, they surrendered all rights except protection.

Going a bit beyond Hobbes -- If protection is the over-riding goal, most Americans would do best in an absolutist police-state. If protection trumps all other concerns, Americans should have no qualms about using torture if, on balance, it seems expedient to do so to protect Americans.

"Freedom isn't free" as the truism goes, and neither is decency. If we wish to preserve the liberty we inherited, we must be willing to take risks; if we wish to bequeath liberty to America's children, we must be willing to put those children at risk. If we're to behave decently and "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," including our Bill of Rights, we must take risks.

Let's say most of our Federal legislators are right and Americans are unwilling to imprison convicted or suspected terrorists even in maximum-security prisons in our area codes or maybe even time zones. Not even if that unwillingness would prohibit giving terrorist suspects trials. Not even if that unwillingness keeps Guantanamo open as a prison and a blot on America's reputation.

If we won't expose ourselves to even small risks, we are puppies, if not quite cowards, at least insufficiently valiant to live long as free and decent people.

Former Vice President Cheney says that a little torture saved many American lives. How is he so sure-- and how many lives? If we're talking hundreds of thousands of lives, I'd be willing to sacrifice decency and some American honor. I'm not a rigid ideologue nor so much with the Christians and classical Anarchists that I'd argue that evil should never be done to prevent greater evil; but I'm also not a total puppy. How many lives, Mr. Cheney, and how do you know?

President Obama talks about preventive detention of terrorist suspects we might not be able to convict even with military tribunals. For how long, such detention, Mr. President? How many men? What sort of precedent do we set for, say, "domestic terrorists" like environmental activists?

I can't believe we're risking lives in very large numbers in releasing long-held terrorism suspects into the United States -- not if the FBI tries to keep track of them and to use them to uncover terrorist cells. Not if their release decreases at least slightly the intensity of hatred for us.

I'm far from brave myself, but I'm willing to have a few more tightly-surveilled potential terrorists in the USA, to add to our home-grown, all-American variety (no, not environmentalist tree-spikers but more like the "Minute Men" who left the message, "Tell Erlich the cross-hairs are on the back of his neck").

Benjamin Franklin warned his contemporaries in 1759, "Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Preserving American liberty as enshrined in the Bill of Rights is worth taking risks and taking casualties, including civilian casualties. Preserving decency is worth equal sacrifice.

If we allow ourselves to do evil out of fear, we are puppies, and rabid puppies to boot.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor at Miami University, Oxford, OH, retired in Ventura County, California.

How wrong is torture? Sen. John McCain reminded us, in 2007 (when he was against torture before he was in favor of it), that some Japanese soldiers were executed after World War II for waterboarding American soldiers.

In today's New York Times, the FBI interrogator who interrogated (not tortured! Seriously; both the FBI and the U.S. military refused to engage in the torture the CIA willingly participated in) Abu Zubaydah refutes the Bush administration argument that torturing Zubaydah provided actionable intelligence:

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn't, or couldn't have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions -- all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

And, by the way, 24 is not real and torture doesn't work.

Former Massachusetts Governor and presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who for some reason is still asked his opinion about things, thinks that investigating Bush administration officials for their complicity in torture is just "partisanship." I suppose this means that mercilessly investigating Bill Clinton for eight years in order to get something, anything, to stick and then unsuccessfully impeaching him for perjury is ... justice?

Thankfully, Obama contradicted the statements of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs by saying that it's up to the Attorney General to decide whether or not to prosecute people for torture.

Paul Krugman connects the dots after eight years and discovers a Grand Unified Scandal going on in our name:

Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There's a word for this: it's evil.

According to Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine, you can correlate the torture timeline with the events leading up to the Iraq War, providing support for the argument that torture was not used to prevent another terrorist attack, but was instead used to find support -- any support -- for an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. Former Vice President Cheney, however, has waffled on the issue of government secrecy. Once the champion of making sure the American people have no idea what their government is doing, Cheney instead wants the CIA to declassify memos showing how effective torture was. That makes it okay!

All of this revelation doesn't stop Fox News' Shepard Smith from putting his head in the sand. It's as though he's having a flashback to when he was eight years old and woke up in the middle of the night to find his mother replacing the tooth under his pillow with a dollar bill.

One more interesting observation: the Spanish government wants to prosecute six former Bush administration officials for holding and torturing five Spanish residents in Guantanamo Bay. If the U.S. government can lay claim to "extraordinary rendition," then why can't Spain order the kidnapping and rendition of such U.S. citizens as John Yoo and Jay Bybee?

But none of these revelations stop Roger Cohen from telling us to let bygones be bygones. Imagine if we told that to Simon Weisenthal? Germany still wants to have John Demjanjuk extradited to stand trial for crimes he committed as a prison guard during the Holocaust, despite his old age. The Justice Department retroactively revoked his U.S. citizenship because he lied about being a Nazi prison guard. Why don't they look forward, and not backward?

Before the Taliban take over more of Afghanistan and set their sights on Pakistan and its nuclear arms, before Mexico becomes an open battleground for the drug trade in the United States, before the State of California is nudged further toward bankruptcy because we can't afford room and board for a huge prison population, and before another generation of American young men of color find themselves more likely in prison than a university--before things get even worse, can we Americans finally have an adult conversation about drugs and drug policy?

Such a conversation might begin with a story I heard from a cop who had brought a truant schoolchild home to her mother. The girl had missed a lot of school because she was often drunk. The mother's reaction: "Well, at least she's not on drugs!"

The cop resisted the temptation to shake the mother and scream at her that her little girl was an alcoholic; the girl was on drugs and a drug addict: by any honest definitions of "drug" and "addict."

Honesty is a good place to start: alcohol is a drug, and so are nicotine, caffeine, Viagra, aspirin, antibiotics, and anabolic steroids.

Once in a literature class we needed a formal definition of "drug," and a student said a drug was a substance, often manipulated by people, that has a psychological and/or physiological effect when introduced into the body. I noted that such a definition would include even white sugar; the student replied only, "Well?"

He had a point. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, there's a reference to a "poor pennyworth of sugar-candy" that's both a snack and a drug to make one "long-winded" (3.3). In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney W. Mintz has sugar as a "food-drug." And seeing sugar as a drug as well as food is useful for seeing how important drug production has been in the history of the Americas and for how long there's been an intimate connection among drugs, the state, and organized crime.

Sugar and molasses, and the sugar-product rum--along with tobacco--were crucial parts of the triangular commerce that had as its most notorious portion the trade in slaves from West Africa.

Many Americans were in the drug business from our beginning, and, by historical standards, the narco-crime lords of today are small-time hoods when put against evil on the scale of the slave-trade.

So we've got a culture heavily into drugs, a culture that has known sin, and we're going to have to deal with that--but we can deal with it.

A student who'd become a drug counselor asked me if I remembered the fears of a heroin epidemic when US troops came home from Vietnam. We had a fair number of soldiers who used heroin in 'Nam, and we'd been warned that many would bring their habit home.

There was no epidemic.

Heroin use was fairly common among troops in Vietnam because pain was common. The great majority of apparently addicted soldiers left their pain in Vietnam and with it their more powerful painkillers. If they came home to a decent neighborhood and a decent life, they left their drug as easily as people leave even more powerful painkillers when they leave the hospital. If the ex-soldiers came home to pain, in areas where heroin was easily available, then there was a good chance they'd go back on heroin.

As my ex-student taught me, it's never "The Addict" and "The Drug"--abstractions worse than useless--but real-world addicts with different metabolisms in complex social contexts interacting with a wide range of drugs.

With an honest definition of "drugs," we can look at history and sociology, and then take two important steps to deal with America's drug problems. First, we should lump drugs together and consider the role(s) of drugs in our society from aspirin to heroin to alcohol to antibiotics; and then we must very carefully distinguish among drugs and their uses and abuses.

Graham Nash notwithstanding, we cannot really "change the world-- /
Re-arrange the world"; but we can stop lying to ourselves about "A Drug-Free America" and get on with what can be done to minimize harm from drugs and maximize their usefulness.

In an earlier time of economic distress--and none too soon--America gave up on the capital "P" Prohibition of beverage alcohol; we can be equally smart about easing or eliminating many of our current prohibitions, however much Americans hate to quit, even when we're quitting banging our heads into walls.

We can, though (maybe) be smarter than the Americans who ended alcohol Prohibition. If we deal with psychoactive drugs as a group, within a broader consideration of drug use generally, I think we'll conclude that we can more than make up for any problems with legalizing drugs like marijuana and heroin if we forbid their advertising and marketing and apply similar prohibitions to alcohol and nicotine products. As funny as the Cheech and Chong routine is, it would be bad to have commercials touting, "Acapulco Gold Is Bad-Ass Weed"; even so, it's probably a bad idea to have great commercials and attractive packaging for alcohol products.

To update a point from John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (1859), a product can be legal, but pushing the product can be strongly regulated.

Beer and wine will have to remain widely available, but anything stronger can go into clean and safe, but definitely stodgy "Drug Stores" where the single malt scotch can sit next to liquid THC--smoking marijuana should be discouraged--in plain black-on-white packages telling adult customers, as honestly as bureaucrats can, what the drug will do for them, and what it might do to them.

That's one possible outcome, one you might not like, especially if your drug-of-choice is fancy scotch. I won't press the point. What I will press is that we have to move now to serious discussion.

We cannot afford narco-terrorists winning in Afghanistan or in Mexico. We literally can't afford to maintain a large and aging prison population. And we never could afford the dishonesty, nor the class, race, ethnicity, and generational conflict at the corrupt heart of "The War on Drugs."

It's not a war with drugs; it's a set of social issues, including problems in public health. Let's quit the war and get to work on the problems.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor, Miami University (Oxford, OH), who retired to Port Hueneme, CA.

Okay, here's an angle on the Michael Phelps marijuana debate you haven't seen yet: grammatical.

Consider the following sample sentence: "The police broke in and saw in the sordid, sinful scene alcohol and drugs, a bong and drug paraphernalia, a pistol and weapons, and an editor and human beings."

In approximately 16,500 instances on the World Wide Web the name "Michael Phelps" was associated with the phrase "alcohol and drugs" or "drugs and alcohol," and, I am certain, most readers read over the phrase with no problems.

There's a problem, a problem my sample sentence should make clear.

A bong is an item of drug paraphernalia; pistols are weapons; editors are human beings -- and beverage alcohol, drunk to induce pleasure or avoid pain, is a drug.

To correct the phrase, one can say "alcohol and other drugs" or "alcohol and illegal drugs. Such corrections are easy, and that "alcohol and drugs" is a common phrase is important for the debate on marijuana and other drugs.

Alcohol use as beer is about as old as human civilization. If alcohol is a drug, drug use is at least as old as civilization. And looking at beer, wine, mead, marijuana, coca, opium, psychoactive mushrooms, caffeine -- etc., one can say that the great majority of human cultures have had drug use as a normal activity. You can say it's pathological or sinful, but drug use is statistically normal; people who don't use some drug are unusual, and in a statistical sense, abnormal.

"The exception proves the rule" means that exceptions test rules (compare "The proof of the pudding is in the eating"), and honest debaters should test generalized and sensationalized assertions about DRUGS!! by taking as an example of a drug something like a good Merlot or, for fun with conservatives, Coors beer.

If alcohol is a drug, statements about the risks of drug use must contain references to the personal risks and social costs of alcohol. From there we can go to the history of drug control in the USA, including the capital "P" Prohibition of booze in the early 20th century. And from there we can trace the social effects of Prohibition and compare them with the effects of our current drug prohibitions.

For example, my mother and her sister found themselves avoiding bullets behind a car during a drive-by shooting on a street in Chicago. That was during Prohibition, and Chicago-area gangs were working out disputes over, primarily, booze-distribution territory.

Sound familiar? Well such "Capitalism by other means" made economic street-sense during Prohibition, and violent gang competition continues to make such sense today, with high costs for society. My mother and aunt could've been killed, and gang members and other people are killed.

Further, Prohibition denied the American State tax monies desperately needed during the Great Depression, so it should be no surprise that Prohibition went into effect in the expanding economy of 1919 and got repealed in the depressed year of 1933. "The Great Experiment" became too expensive, both in direct costs and foregone revenue.

In 1919, however, the US was going Isolationist; in 2009, we're up to our figurative corporate butt in two wars. And in one of those wars, in Afghanistan, the figurative "War on Drugs" is getting in the way of a literal struggle against extremists.

Michael Phelps has some things to apologize for. He should apologize again for driving drunk at age 19. And he should apologize for inhaling. Cooled smoke taken with a water pipe is less harmful than hot smoke from a reefer, but Phelps still set a bad example, and set himself up for betrayal, by so openly putting any smoke into his lungs. He should have taken his marijuana in dope tea, banana bread, or bran muffins (brownies are mostly empty calories).

If we remember that it's "alcohol and other drugs," we can see that occasionally getting zonked is normal human, adult behavior. And it's not a bad idea -- a sober driver having been designated -- for a compulsive athlete like Michael Phelps.

Richard D. Erlich is a 66-year-old retiree from Miami University (Oxford, OH); he remembers the 1960s, and 1970s, well enough not to be a total hypocrite.

And, furthermore, is this necessary? Turns out yes. Aggregate demand is falling: people, anticipating a recession, spend less. Companies spend less. And, especially in this economy, companies spend less on capital projects that require credit. Banks are still loathe to extend credit, since they can't trust anybody. When aggregate demand falls, the government must step in and take up the slack until people buy things again.

Republicans don't like this idea. They don't like spending money. Unless that money goes to contracts that would result in kickbacks from lobbyists. Or unless that money gets spend on the Department of Defense. And that money spend at DoD results in contracts that would result in kickbacks from lobbyists.

Sorry, sorry. Cheap shot, I know. Let's be post-partisan. Okay, Republicans don't like the idea. Rep. John Boehner, the House Minority Leader (from The Great State of Ohio!) has said his party intends to vote against the bill unless the 2001 Bush tax cuts are made permanent, among other things.

You know what, John Boehner? You go ahead and do that. But first, you might like to catch up on the news you've apparently missed for the last three months. As it turns out, your party lost. And it lost big. Remember that presidency you lost? And the eight Senate seats (not counting Minnesota, where Republican incumbent Norm Coleman will likely lose)? And the twenty-two House seats? Adding up all these numbers, it appears -- and I'm not entirely sure on this -- that you aren't in a position to be making demands. The House can pass whatever it wants even if every Republican votes against it. So can the Senate. And then, the Democratic president will sign it into law. (You may wish to call up your Originalist judges to overturn the law, just in case. They have a firepole, so they can move quick!)

The stimulus package will move ahead, whether you like it or not. It will move ahead with an end to the Bush tax cuts. Senate Republicans can filibuster the bill, and I would love to see Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid let them. At that point, the Republican spin machine would choke and the gears would come to a halt. How could they put their P.R. to work on refusing to stimulate the economy? It bodes nothing but badly for them. Reid would do well to let them dig their own grave and show Americans once and for all that Republicans aren't interested in helping the middle class.

Then again, a filibuster might happen. Not every Republican senator can be so easily duped. I'm looking at Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He's shown his willingness to disagree with Republicans before. Democrats would need only two more votes to invoke cloture and end any filibusters.

Thankfully, Democrats do not appear to be backing down. In 2007, they used their newly-minted majority status to ... do everything the Bush administration wanted. Hmm. Well, never let it be said that Democrats know when they're ahead. I guess that prior sentence should be modified: Democrats do not appear to be backing down (but they might!). But once -- just once -- it would be nice for Democrats not to screw things up by acting like a beaten puppy and capitulating at the first sign of conflict. They won; Republicans lost. Now, they have an agenda that they want to advance. Republicans want to stop that agenda, but they no longer have the ability to do so. And what Republicans want is not what Americans want. Not anymore. So they can play their P.R. game and send John Boehner on Meet the Press to explain why it's just too much money, but they'll be left to explain themselves.

And a Republican trying to explain himself is a sure way to clear the room.

So no more complaining about George W. Bush.

Now, it's time to fix everything he broke. Maybe we can start with attitudes about abortion. This is very funny: anti-abortion advocates roundly agree that women who have abortions should be punished -- but they are unwilling or unable to articulate what that punishment is. They agree that abortion is murder, and yet that are far from ready to suggest that women who have abortions should be sentenced to the same punishment as murderers.

The full bit, as I heard it from a "12-Step" person, was that you'd say to a member of a family in denial (of alcoholism in the family, or whatever), "Uh, about the hippopotamus in your living room ..." And the response would be, "There is no hippopotamus, and besides, it's only a small hippopotamus -- and we never talk about it outside the family," or, probably, at all.

The joke made an important point: families with problems obvious to outsiders often deny the problems, minimize them, and, when finally conscious of them, will still refuse to deal with them.

A country isn't a family, but -- about some hippopotamuses in America's living room ....

Three big ones are (1) our identity as a people, (2) population policy, and (3) drug policy.

In a recent column, Bill O'Reilly talks about the "deep divisions in the United States" that are in small part revealed in arguments over Christmas.

For once O'Reilly may understate.

Anthony Burgess somewhere calls America -- with disapproval -- "a secular, revolutionary republic." That's one possibility, an identity we celebrate on the Fourth of July. We may also be a nation or a Judeo-Christian nation or a plain old Christian nation; and a quick surf on the web will bring you to sites where we're a "White, Christian nation." Or we may be more ecumenically and less racistly a religious and family-oriented nation, a nation many celebrate on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Our view of ourselves makes a difference, certainly for me.

I'm not Christian, and to orthodox Klanners and neoNazis I'm not White. If the USA is a White and/or Christian nation, a lot of Americans are excluded: me for one, but also Catholics, according to a hardly-unique college student who said, "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian."

If we're essentially a secular republic, born in an Enlightenment revolution, we can all be citizens, if we agree on the basic principles of the republic. Which is good and my position, but is rather cold and intellectual even for me: I don't celebrate Christmas, but I do like Thanksgiving; far more important, in emergencies, the emotional strength of nationhood is crucial.

Seeing ourselves as a nation can also ease decision-making on population policy and drug policy.

For population policy, "People are the riches of a nation," and a modern economy demands growth: "More people, more sales." And, of course, "In numbers there is strength": large nations can support powerful militaries and survive high casualties. So if we're a nation, we should continue encouraging bearing and raising lots of kids, providing public education, tax breaks, and other benefits even for couples with four or five children.

For drug policy, the rule for a nation is what William Bennett once said it is: the laws are the laws and what is crucial is obedience to those laws. A nation is "the family writ large" -- a patriarchal family -- and the kids are to follow Dad's rules, and that is that; indeed, a few weird rules are a good idea: sensible rules test mostly common sense; nonsensical ones train in obedience and -- each time obeyed -- reinforce parental authority.

But re-producing lots more Americans and people who want to live like Americans is a bad idea in a world of environmental degradation and declining resources. Continuing "The War On Drugs" warps public discourse -- a "drug-free America" would have to do without antibiotics, aspirin, and beer -- hurts Black and Hispanic communities and the young, and undercuts far more literal U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, while worsening problems in such neighbors as Mexico, Columbia, and Peru.

Nation vs. republic -- and there are other ways to see ourselves -- can't be resolved and probably shouldn't be. But we should be conscious of the conflict here and careful and civil in balancing claims on our identity. For population, drugs, or most other real-world issues, there are no neat, logically elegant solutions.

As with troubled families, some figurative hippos will stick around; we must, though, notice that they're in the living room, acknowledge the size of the problem, and talk seriously about some clean-up.

Richard D. Erlich retired from the English Department at Miami University, Oxford, OH, and now lives in a milder climate in California.

I was and remain a "senior for Obama," a 65-year-old who volunteered for Barack Obama's campaign in the California Democratic primary and in the general election. Still, I'll say this much for my fellow "seniors" who opposed Obama: my central reason for supporting Obama is a reason other old people might rationally oppose him.

Barack Obama offers America a chance to get beyond not race or bigotry but at least beyond racism and "the Southern strategy" as influential ideologies and political maneuvers. On the other hand, the election of Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin would have an equivalent effect on sexism, as an explicit ideology of male superiority.

So let's call that a wash and acknowledge that one could oppose Obama without being a racist. But let us include in that acknowledgement the possibility that a few -- repeat: a few -- old whites could believe that the races are equal and that justice demands racial equality but still desire to maintain, for unjust self-interest, white privilege.

If that idea disturbs you, and I hope it does, keep it in mind while I move from race, which wasn't a crucial issue in the election, to age and generation.

A central political issue is always Cui bono? which I'll translate, "Who gains? Who loses?"

Change in the abstract -- and the word was pretty abstract in the 2008 election -- favors young people over old people. Oldsters usually have any established system down pat; changing things undermines that advantage and favors the young.

Getting more concrete, in the period since the "Tax Revolt" and "The Reagan Revolution," America has operated on a system of running up debt and transferring money from younger and often poorer people to older people; for far longer, the human species has run on a system of using up resources and degrading the environment.

"Posterity don't vote," and ordinarily one can add, "neither do young people." Our rule has been, we profit now; posterity and the current youngsters pay later.

Obama is capable of mobilizing masses of people, emphatically including the young. He has built up the political energy for some major change, and that change will have to include cutting back on spreading the wealth to fairly well-to-do old people.

Now, I recently joined the American Association of Retired Persons to help ensure that we current old folks continue to get ours and maybe a bit more; but there are degrees of privilege, and we in America need to slow down the money flow to old folks and redirect more of it back to the young.

We need to help young people by restoring a maimed environment, restoring America's infrastructure and schools -- and achieving a sustainable economy. We need to distribute health-care more equitably, perhaps by opening up Medicare to the young.

So don't think too harshly of the old who voted against Barack Obama; but do remind them that they lost the election, and that that loss should have consequences. The times they have a-changed, and we have a president not beholden to old folks for his election. And he's eloquent enough to move Americans to make some sacrifices. Among those who must agree to some sacrifice are old people like me.

Richard D. Erlich is a retired professor, living on a decent pension in California In advancing age, he prefers to think of himself as an old-fart curmudgeon and prides himself in having gone from angry young man to curmudgeon with few missed steps.

• the degree to which PCs come pre-loaded with trial software
• the prevalence of viruses on PCs
• the ease with which Mac users can create and publish Web content
• Windows Vista's security concerns

These are all critiques that are "arguable" in that they present an argument. Apple argues that the implementation of Windows Vista's User Account Control presents security problems. It is now Microsoft's responsibility to respond.

Or, at least, that's how it should be.

Microsoft has, through its "I'm a PC" commercials, decided not to address the arguable parts of Apple's Get a Mac ads at all. Instead, Microsoft will address the non-arguable part of the ads; namely, the stereotypes of the PC users.

Yes, certainly we understand that the Get a Mac commercial, with its young and hip Mac constantly trying to understand the old and stodgy PC, dabbles in stereotypes. Microsoft wishes to fire back, suggesting that not all PC users are stodgy; indeed, many of them are just as hip -- if not more so -- than Mac users.

But that's not the point. Will this really convince potential Apple customers not to switch to a Mac? No one buys a Mac because he or she thinks it will make him or her "hip." People switch to Macs for all the reasons outlined above: Macs are perceived as easier to use and more secure. Regardless of whether or not this is the case (and that's a discussion for another day), this is the perception of Macs in the general public. If Microsoft really wants to tear customers away from Apple, it will need to address the arguable issues, not the inarguable ones. And it is these arguable issues that matter to consumers; indeed, it's the point behind advertising. Does Diet Dr. Pepper really have the same taste as regular Dr. Pepper? That is at issue, and the advertising tries to persuade the consumer that, yes, they taste the same. This will induce the consumer to buy Diet Dr. Pepper.

In the same way, Microsoft would be better served hiring an ad agency whose campaign addresses the arguable issues. Does Windows Vista have security problems? Is a Mac really easier to use than a PC? The recent election showed us that unarguable issues don't really matter to voters: to call Barack Obama a "socialist" means nothing. To suggest that he'll raise your taxes? Now that's arguable!

The public perception of Microsoft has nothing to do with its hipness and everything to do with Windows' own problems: viruses, stability, security, compatibility. Microsoft could, for example, counter Apple's campaigns by pointing out that there are far more applications (and games!) designed for Windows than there are designed for Macs. Microsoft either doesn't recognize that this is its problem, or it doesn't want to recognize that this is its problem. It appears that Microsoft would rather deflect the substantive issues altogether and change the subject. Unfortunately, consumers who are thinking about whether to buy a Mac or a PC have the substantive issues very much in their minds, and those issues won't be lured away by a funny commercial about how everyone can be a PC.

This is a continuation of what I had to say in an essay stating that life doesn't begin; it began. There I pointed out that the abortion controversy doesn't really have to do with the question of when life begins or "What is life?" but with "What is human?" -- when a living being becomes and should be recognized as a "(human) person under the law."

It's a dangerous question.

Slavery in the US was based in the idea that Blacks were not fully human and, hence, could be bought and sold and exploited like nonhuman animals. Nazi extermination programs were based even more consciously in the idea that Jews and Roma (Gypsies) and other groups were literally degenerate and/or subhuman. I wouldn't want to employ what's been called "The 'Twice is Always' Rule," but it should give us a serious warning to recall that these questions of definition of "human" weren't resolved by argument but by wars.

People aren't always -- or often? -- logical, but we are indirectly governed by logics, plural: where different ideas lead. Push to its end one way to oppose abortion, and the logic goes like this.

Human beings are essentially souls, souls to be saved. (The body is at most the temple of the soul, at worst its prison.)

Human beings are "ensouled" at the moment of conception, so a human zygote -- the fertilized egg -- is not just a unique individual organism but an unborn baby, in some variations, an unborn baby who can be saved or damned.

To kill that baby is the murder of an innocent, and possibly worse: the condemning of that innocent to Hell as an unbaptized baby. The abortion rate in the US is now at a very low point, as these things go, but we're still talking some 1.2 million abortions in 2005. If a human zygote, embryo, fetus is a human child, that's a body-count each year of massacre proportions.

Even as it is the shame of the World War II Allies that they didn't do all they could to act against the Hitlerian Holocaust -- including bombing the camps and the rail lines when begged to -- so it is to the shame (and damnation?) of members of our generation to fail to do everything possible to stop a holocaust in unborn, unbaptized babies.

Maybe including, as a last resort, violence, even lethal violence against those one sees -- following such logic -- as mass murderers.

On the other side (the one I'm on) is a logical and historical argument less rigorous, or rigid, but equally powerful: for giving women control over their bodies.

These arguments can't be reconciled by argument, but there is a possibility for a political resolution, and we know what it is. You attempt to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare": which includes actively pushing birth control and hell yes, making condoms readily available to anyone old enough to know what they are -- and making sure U.S. kids know about birth-control/STD-prevention by puberty. It means the opportunity for freely-made, early decisions by women who might want an abortion to have one or to carry the fetus to term. And on the other side, it means legal restrictions on late-term abortions.

Such a resolution is no solution and it neither will nor should satisfy a lot of people (press the Slavery/Holocaust analogy, and you'll see the problem). But most Americans will be able to live with it, and such a messy resolution will allow us to get through a very dangerous period and move on to other conflicts.

Richard D. Erlich is a Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He lives in Ventura County, California.