If all you can hold in your billionaire head is one value at a time, then maybe you clutch onto an idea that you’re calling free speech, say. Speech is good, free speech is better. The freer the speech, the more of it, the better. Flood the zone with free speech.

But a lowly millionaire might easily know that (for better or worse) an idea grows more powerful when it is linked to a second and a third idea. Free speech, the first value, is transformed when combined with a second idea: a space where you can flood the zone with an irresistible torrent of relevant, irrelevant, dogmatic, irreverent, fervent, high-pitched, sometimes even barely coherent speech. This serves as a shortcut through the concerns and objections of other human beings. No need to respect their sorry souls, no need to listen. You can’t even tell if they’re speaking, the din around them, around us all, is so loud. Still, if you want power, something you want to call free speech plus a place for a million voices to all call out at once leaves the side door to the power dashboard less guarded than it should be.

But if there really is a value that deserves the venerated name free speech, and a space to practice this value, and a group of other people not scorned but perhaps accepted and respected for what they’ve witnessed in life, a place where people can for a time, for a project, affiliate with each other and get some thinking and then some work done, well, then the idea of speech in a social space where decency has a chance to prevail starts to make sense. The linked chain of values, speech-place-civil audience, makes free speech more meaningful. The billionaire might not get that, the one-idea-at-a-time billionaire, or his distracted-by-thoughts-of-power millionaire buddy neither. But we can see it, and maybe even achieve it sometimes, here and there. We can remember times when it happened. We can recall the circumstances, the necessary layers of precondition that made it possible. That still make it possible.

My Facebook posting today.

Usually, not always, I shy away from mentioning politics on Facebook. Please tune out, if you prefer. Over on Fox, which is generally the friendly chat platform for politicians who use the pro-life slogan, they’re starting to talk about ending the social distancing very soon, and as they say, likely letting elders die as a result, in order to protect American wealth. (I don’t actually see why the plan would work, by the way.)

I don’t understand why a “pro-life”-chanting national political party could stomach this line of thought, but that national party is almost always uncritically in favor of, for example, our country’s military actions overseas, so the pro-life slogan is hard to take seriously when spoken by that party’s leaders.

Few of the party leaders support a military draft, crudely taking advantage of the military service tradition in lots of American families while avoiding the wide, democratic public discussion that possible declarations of war cause when the whole country is at risk of being called to serve.

That’s a crass manipulation on their part, but no more crass than the party’s well-known perfection of gerrymandering to avoid thinking overly much about the opinions of voters. These politicians do a very fine job of making government look a bit like a democracy while paying less and less attention to what that should mean.

Here in Indiana, for example, my US House member almost never visits places where she would run into Democratic voters. Some but not all of these weaknesses, failings, and manipulations are shared by both national parties.

Anyway, the national Republican Party uses the words “pro-life” as part of a morally incoherent grab-bag of tricks and tools whose focus is power. Nor will most of these leaders criticize the President when he opines hatefully to his rallies or when he doesn’t bother to get the basic facts straight when discussing a deadly international crisis on TV. For reason after reason, when the national Republican Party remains in power real people suffer and die.

Well, if you have read this far, thank you for doing so. I am not going to argue about any of this here—doing so feels unhealthy for us all. If you’d like to argue, please do NOT do so here or in private messages—everyone can read your political thoughts on your own Facebook stream. Thank you.

End of Facebook posting.

PS. Don’t get me started on the national Democratic Party…

The twelve of us got off to a good start. We discovered some points of common ground – for one thing, we joked about wishing we weren’t on the jury. We also shared the goal of completing the task, and we were all relieved to discover the case was brief and didn’t provide very many ways to disagree. One of the jurors had served on a murder trial a few years earlier. She said that it had been difficult and interesting, and telling us that set a proper tone for the work at hand.

Everything at the courthouse was formal and ceremonial in a way that was just right for the serious work being done there. The judge kept us well-informed during the entire trial. “Folks,” he’d say, and then he would explain to the jury what would happen next. I came to respect his careful approach, and I was happy to help re-elect him the following November.

The prosecuting attorney presented a well-organized case that took us step by step through the events. Strategically, he held back until near the end the fact that the defendant had been convicted on related charges twice before. The defense attorney was strategic, too, focusing on the one thing that could win his client an acquittal. Did she know she was cashing a bad check?

If she knew, she was guilty; if she didn’t know, she was innocent. The jury’s job was to figure out what was in the defendant’s mind when she walked into the bank with that check. We especially considered the defendant’s own testimony. I remembered when they brought the check over in the courtroom and she looked at it as a person might look at a small poisonous snake. It was not hard to see the gravity of the work we were doing and the impact it might have on her life. In a little under two hours we were able to reach a unanimous decision.

As foreman of the jury, I filled out the verdict form, signed it, and carried it into the courtroom with my fellow jurors. Soon the clerk took the paper from my hand and carried it across the room. The judge read the verdict, then said that it was signed by the foreman, and then he spoke my name. I felt the weight of our guilty verdict a little more deeply just then.

The other juror had been right. Jury duty is, like some of the best things in life, difficult and interesting. I was grateful to have a chance to talk seriously with a group of well-meaning people about something of substance. On jury duty I saw that it is possible to cross lines that sometimes divide our society, lines like class and race, and come to an understanding through deliberation. That was jury duty’s gift to me.

In the years immediately after World War II, a young man named Gordon Henderson wrote an unpublished novel based on his experience serving in the 82nd Airborne Division from the late summer of 1944 to the end of the war. A member of his family has told me that the novel runs closely parallel to the letters he sent home during those months. Last night I reread the typed pages about the first couple of days of the Battle of the Bulge. At that time, the Division was in reserve, behind the fighting lines, recuperating from the Market Garden battles.

The chapter begins late on December 17th. The main character, George, and his fellow privates are sharing rumors–which they call “latrinograms”–about the Division suddenly making a big move. Lights are on at the officer’s temporary headquarters building late into the night. A big car marked with the insignia of a high officer arrives to join in the secret conversation taking place there.

The privates consider the possibilities. The Division might return to England and prepare for another major airborne mission, a brutal and terrifying prospect that would, at least, begin with a couple of months away from combat. But stirring the Division suddenly, in the middle of the night, for this kind of move makes no sense to them. Still, they plainly long for those remembered and imagined months in England.

A command comes out to pack up all the gear, supplies, and ammunition. By morning the Division will be in trucks and on the road, heading for unfamiliar towns with place names soon to be in the world news. George, the main character, is an artillery spotter, as was Gordon, the author. By afternoon, their convoy encounters streams of traffic fleeing the front. Looks like the whole U.S. Army is leaving Belgium, except for us, the privates observe, ominously. The trucks roll toward the front, towing their artillery pieces. In the back of each truck, a jumble of men sleep as best they can leaning against each other on and among the jumble of supplies.

As you can see from this brief summary, Gordon Henderson was a good storyteller.