The Wire

I am finding Bill Moyers Journal to be the height of my weekly ritual. The ideas are rich and deep. This week was no different. David Simon was a crime reporter for the The Baltimore Sun
and creator of the HBO series The Wire. Here are some highlights of what I walked away with:

• All institutions corrupt themselves as individuals distort the truth for personal gain. Without good investigative journalism allot of it goes unreported and uncorrected. Examples include politicians, police commissioners, and educators who "juke the stats" to create the appearance of success. These same institutions are entrusted with solving problems and they don't.
  
• The underclass in America is seen as disposable to decision makers (including voters). When tough choices and priorities are set those that are not needed get left out.
  
• The drug policy in the US is broken. The drug trade is the only viable economic activity for someone facing no meaningful future. Prisons don't solve it.
  
• The balance between personal gain and public good could shift as watchdogs like newspapers and an informed public erode.

The full video of David Simon on Bill Moyers Journal is available online here.

Parker Palmer on Bill Moyers

Interesting discussion on dreams and reality and the dangers of living too far in either direction.

BILL MOYERS: You've written that we all have to learn to live in what you call the tragic gap. Now, some people are going to find that notion very un-American then because it flies in the face of the fundamental American assumption of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What is the tragic gap? And who wants to live there?

PARKER PALMER: Well, I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy. And I think the opportunity now is for us to get real. And I think that's going to make us, in the long run, more happy. The tragic gap, and I call it tragic not because it's sad. It is. But more fundamentally because it's an inevitable part of the human condition.

Tragic in the sense that the Greeks talked about it. Tragic in the sense that Shakespeare talked about it. The tragic gap is the gap between what's really going on around us, the hard conditions in which our lives are currently immersed, and what we know to be possible from our own experience.

We don't see it every day. We may not see it very often. But we know it's a possibility among real people and real space and time. Now, what happens when we don't learn to hold the tension between what is and what we know to be possible?

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