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.

The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America
James T. Patterson
When I think of “the Sixties,” I think of two dates: 1963, the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and 1968, the year of Tet and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. James T. Patterson, author of the critically acclaimed The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America, posits that what we call the Sixties really began in 1965, the year after Lyndon B. Johnson won the presidency in his own right by a landslide.

None of the twenty-five activists for the Ashtabula County Charter Initiative, designed to move power back into the hands of Americans on how their county is governed, had read, or even heard of the newly released book, “Presidential Puppetry,” by Andrew Kreig.

They had come together in the tiny meeting room of the Board of Elections in Jefferson, Ohio, to let their voices be heard as the Board considered whether or not to honor the opinion issued by County Prosecutor Thomas Sartini, which cast doubt on the fate of a measure which has brought together people from every political viewpoint.

As they coalesced around returning power to the people they became another point of action in a country which is rejecting partisan politics and moving toward a civic model which echoes the vision which still lives in the minds and hearts of people around the world. Kreig's book provides the reasons why Americans must move past the politics of parties, embracing the power to locally determine how their government will work – for them.