"I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of the United States since the termination of hostilities has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II ... It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases, weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thought - in short, the psychological factors - are considered as unimportant and secondary ... The general insecurity that goes hand in hand with this results in the sacrifice of the citizen's civil rights to the supposed welfare of the state."

–Albert Einstein, The Military Mentality

I am not a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes people label me that way. Many of my friends get labeled that way, and some of them might be – but some of them clearly aren't. In order to know for sure, we would have to know what is meant by the term.

What I keep longing to hear, in the hemorrhaging national debate about Edward Snowden, whistleblowing and the NSA, is some acknowledgment of what the word “security” actually means, and what role — if any — the government should play in creating it.

"You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy."

A moment of silence, please, for the dying patriarchy. That, of course, was how President Obama explained it to the American public shortly after the spy scandal hit the fan. When did we become “the children” in our relationship with the government, irrelevant to its day-to-day operations, utterly powerless as we stand in its massive, protecting shadow?

If you want to be safe, boys and girls, we need to collect and store data about all the phone calls you make and all the emails you send, along with the phone calls and emails of nearly everyone else on the planet as well. This is just how it works. Privacy is nice, but the terrorists are out there, plotting stuff even as we speak. And that’s really all you need to know — that we’re working round the clock to stop them and keep you safe.

What is the plan for our nation’s cities? Are they simply to simmer with a growing divide between the affluent financial district and the impoverished slums? Will another generation be lost while we wait for the inevitable explosions? The gulf between the realities of our cities and the foolishness of our politics has seldom been wider.

Consider gun violence. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Chicago surpassed 200 homicide deaths for the year. On that weekend alone, 10 people were killed and several dozen wounded in gun violence, including 5- and 7-year-old boys. The only grim salvation in the savage toll is that the city’s year-to-date homicide rate is rising at a somewhat slower rate than last year.