Life promises us nothing. The quality of our lives is determined as much by arbitrary circumstance as it is by our individual capacity for learning and enterprise. And if we go by our standards here in America, the arbitrary circumstance for most of the world is pretty rough.

Take those in Syria, or in other countries desperate for survival, food and a form of government that offers them a chance at modest prosperity. We already have those things, yet our sense of well-being seems to be “slip-sliding away” as Paul Simon sang in the 70s. We worry about what the future holds for us.

Our high school graduates now have about the same chance of finding work as those coming out of college with a debt load that will consume much of their first decade of earnings. In Portland, Oregon where my daughter is a college senior, graduates make deli sandwiches and the sex trade is thriving.

Nationally, the job market is stagnant except in forward-looking industries. Employers are either flooded with applications for jobs they don’t have or with job openings for which they have no qualified applicants. Employment, like wealth, is polarizing, with menial service jobs at one end and higher paying jobs in the sciences, technology and innovation industries at the other. Even the professions offer less opportunity for secure employment and retirement savings.

A good part of the problem is that our schools continue to educate for a waning economy, not the emerging one.

Furthermore, we ourselves have gotten lazy about education, less in our schools than in our own homes. Education’s failing grades begin in the home, not in the school. We aren’t engaged in our children’s education, we don’t hold them accountable for their work. We are incurious ourselves. Helicopter parents are not accountable parents. They look over the teacher’s shoulder rather than over the shoulders of their children. They curry favor with their children whose affection they seem to need more than their respect. But what our children think about our parenting is far less important than how well we motivate and exemplify their love of learning.

As much as we may need to reinvent our schools and colleges for the future, we also need to remember that life is what we make it, not what our government gives us.

Reviving our once exemplary economy depends on repairing the damage we have done to the culture of our once revered educational system. This is at the heart of why things seem to be slip-sliding away. They are, and the fault is our own, not government, regulators, a welfare state, or any other sinister demon.

We must make education the number one topic in our homes and also in our schools, not carry on about job creators as if they were our only hope. We must regulate business fairly and strategically. We must rebalance the interests of our citizens and business. We must finally stop blaming everyone but ourselves.

Social conservatives like to use the phrase “moral relativism” to describe their liberal counterparts, perhaps because absolutes are simple and easy to remember, if not to live by. Our judicial system was designed for the reality of moral relativism. Whenever we try to impose moral absolutes they fail.

A judge must understand and act on the relative merits of each case. Remember the Rockefeller drug laws and their mandated sentencing? In the ensuing decades judges had little choice but to lock up more young adults than ever before in our history and drug crimes went from street to pharmacy.

A judge must have the same leeway to punish the “feel good” doctor, liberally dispensing opiates to patients , as he or she has to punish the street drug dealer – the same leeway to sentence the well-heeled financial criminal as he or she has to sentence the street criminal who’s robbed a convenience store.

Life doesn’t respond well to absolutes. One might well argue that the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” is interpreted more liberally in red states, by means of the death penalty and concealed-carry gun laws.

We like to make things simple, but then again, sometimes we don’t when we ourselves feel the pain.

I attended a community meeting recently in which Vermonters discussed practical and impractical ways to express their anger against the Citizens United decision.

The principle behind Citizens United is free speech, the first amendment to our constitution and a founding principle of our democracy. Free speech, however, has always been subject legally to relative rather than absolute interpretation. The free speech that protects pornography does not extend to children. The freedom of expression that protects public proclamations does not include yelling “fire” in a crowded move theater.

Currently, however, it does protect the cannonade of political rhetoric so riddled with made-up facts that fact-checking has become a growth industry.

The group discussed the legal evolution of how “free speech” came to include money and how corporations became “people”.

There was also concern expressed that Citizens United trumps the long-standing commercial speech doctrine that governs truth in advertising. If corporations are indeed people and their speech has the same protections, truth-in-advertising falls victim to corporate personhood as well. The sky’s the limit.

The judicial activism that conservatives love to condemn, in fact, underlies the evolution of Citizens United and it will take a groundswell of citizen outcry to again differentiate corporations from human beings. Life would be much simpler if we could live by absolutes, but the great challenge and beauty of life lies in its complexity. It places on us the responsibility to think and learn and listen before we act – because the right answers are hardly ever simple.

Life is a balancing act. Complex truths are easily overwhelmed by simplistic ideologies and yes-no answers. The currently popular debate that pits free-market capitalism against shared responsibility for our community’s wellbeing makes for juicy, gladiatorial media bytes but obscures the known fact that it’s always in a capitalist democracy’s best financial interest to support strong communities. If you don’t believe this, consider the alternative.

As communities degrade and finally collapse, the costs in healthcare, corrections, deferred infrastructure maintenance and remedial education skyrocket. Then the debate shifts to whether or not to spend ever more collective wealth managing the ills of a broken society on top of the costs of preventing further collapse. Preemptive investments have always proven more cost-efficient than the cost of managing disorder. An equitably shared commitment to maintain a rigorous public education system, accessible physical and mental healthcare, a blind criminal justice system and public infrastructure goes a long way towards maintaining social and economic order. Just as prenatal care costs less than postnatal illness, a strong military defense has always been cheaper than waging war.

People under stress in a collapsing society resort to expensive though often profitable anodynes to dull the pain of dysfunction like over-medication, over-consumption and over-stimulation, all of which contribute to further dysfunction.

It’s fashionable these days to argue that personal freedom should trump investments in community. But neither individual freedom nor community is paramount and both need our vigilance.

There is reason for our popular distaste for big government and its astronomical costs. But in our ardor for easy solutions, we hoist everything up on the same petard. We’re unwilling to parse out truth from myth, separating graft, corruption, greed, and waste from the social and economic benefits that good government can provide. We’re arguing about whether government is good or bad when we should be discussing how to make it better.

The discussion we should NOT be having is whether capitalism and individual freedom are more important to our future than a shared commitment to community wellbeing. The discussion we SHOULD be having is how one contributes to the other and how we can enhance the prospects for both. But this takes candidates willing to engage in a debate of depth and substance, instead of promoting partisan ideology.

We face some very complex issues as a nation, such as whether or not it makes sense to prosecute two questionable wars – with a third on the horizon, whether to lower taxes on job creators who have not created any domestic jobs, and whether to keep 2 million plus Americans behind bars instead of in classrooms.

Truth needs to be sought out in personal experience, history, art, science, philosophy, and the wisdom and experience of the elders we sequester in nursing homes.

As a nation, we’re addicted to easy answers. Oh, if only life were as simple as a candidate debate!

The most expensive service our government provides to its citizens, other than heroic healthcare in Medicare, Medicaid and the VA, is to lock them up.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, the annual average cost per prisoner in 2008 was $26,000 at the federal level and $24,000 at the local level. Small states likeRhode IslandandVermontestimate their costs much higher at $35-$45,000 a year. This is two to three times our per-pupil costs for public education.

At 743 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, the US incarceration rate is roughly six times greater than that of England, Australia or China. It’s even significantly greater than that of Russia.

The “Land of the Free” now incarcerates more of its citizens than any country in the world.

The term “penitentiary,” meaning a place to do “penance” derives from the early Quaker belief that confining one in solitary would afford them time to consider and repent for their transgressions. Today’s massive penitentiaries sprang from that belief and help explain why we are so out of sync with the rest of the world.

Today, there are three reasons given for putting people in jail: public safety, deterrence and retribution. Statistically, only the first is effective. Most crimes occur in a fit of testosterone, rage, desperation or panic. About-to-be criminals don’t pause and reflect on outcomes …so much for deterrence.

In Christianity at least, Old Testament retribution gave way to Christ’s admonition to forgive. But that persistent Old Testament demand of an eye for an eye is hard to quell and usually trumps the rationale that sending an offender to what amounts to a crime academy doesn’t serve the victim, the criminal or society …so much for retribution.

A society’s incarceration cost usually correlates with its economic stability, addiction rates and random fears ginned up by politicians. Most experts agree that economic crime and incarceration increase as more people fall into poverty.

But the conservative right seems curiously untroubled by the erosion of our once robust middle class and reluctant to acknowledge the increasing number of Americans losing economic ground. They point instead to the tiny minority clawing their way into the rarified world of wealth derived from interest and dividends.

Furthermore, they complain about the cost and size of government, specifically the social safety net and its mandates, but we hear little from them about the skyrocketing cost of incarceration, perhaps because it’s been privatized into a highly profitable business.

It’s hard to deny the correlation between economic stability, equal opportunity and the distribution of wealth – and crime and the cost of corrections. Property crimes occur along a spectrum from need to greed. A parent will steal food to feed a starving child; a kid may kill simply for a pair of designer sneakers. With this in mind, we need to differentiate and invest more in programs like reparative justice, court diversion and early release. We cannot sustain the high cost of corrections, especially when it corrects so little.

By the way our detention rate in Vermont is one of the highest in the nation.

Whether I am ushered into the next world by a choir of cherubs or a bevy of trident-bearing imps, or whether I just compost quietly in nature’s great recycling system is not a matter on which I spend a great deal of thought.

I am, by genetic endowment half-Jewish, by upbringing Roman Catholic, and by choice, agnostic. I neither deny nor assert the existence of God.

I have seen the great comfort and goodness wrought by small churches of all persuasions in the small communities in which I have lived.

I also see the hell-born misery ultra-orthodoxies of all religious types wreak on people the world over. Be it the Taliban, ultra-Orthodox Jews, the far-right Christians or the Sunni-Shiite internecine wars, you name the orthodoxy, and history books and news archives will drown you in tales of persecution, torture and death.

Throughout history there have been oases of peace and sanity where Jews, Christians and Muslims or Buddhists, Muslims and Hindi have flourished in mutual respect. For four centuries prior to the 11th century, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together under moderate Muslim rule in Cordoba, Spain. During the European Holocaust, Muslim Morocco prided itself on defying Vichy’s order to its French colonies to round up their Jews. The Islamic monarchy instead sheltered them from German and French persecution. But examples like these have been rare. And human carnage done in the name of various deities or “with God on our side” as Dylan sings, is common. The subjugation of women across all orthodoxies and the persecution of religious minorities and homosexuals is as prevalent today as the burning of non-Catholics was in the streets of Seville during the Spanish Inquisition.

The recent news coverage of Ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on an 8-year old girl and calling her a “whore” even though she wore the modest uniform of the orthodox school she attended resembles Puritan extremism. And the requirement that women in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods ride in the back of buses recalls our hard-fought civil rights battles here at home.

The slaughter of Muslims by former neighbors with whom they had lived in peace for decades in the former Yugoslavia, the genocidal rampages in Africa, the multi-century cover up of sexual abuse of children in Catholic parishes, all in the name of religion must cause doubt about the existence of God or, at least, about his earthly designates.

I believe in a higher power. I am open, as I was as a young altar boy, to the loving and forgiving God who teaches that the meek shall inherit the earth.

But in observing the ongoing persecution and slaughter conducted on religious grounds, I can’t embrace or even trust religions managed by man in God’s name. I miss the spiritual discipline I knew as a child, but I can’t muster enough faith to forgive institutions willing to fight to accumulate earthly riches and political power – while at the same time perpetuating sexual subjugation of women and children.

I was what conservative business interests would have you believe is a “job creator.” I, and several very smart managers ran, and some still do, a company that worked with national clients.

At our peak, we employed more than 250 Vermonters. Today the company employs fewer than 100, but not because its current owners are paralyzed by fear of taxes or regulation, but because the market has shrunk to that level and any company committed to its own survival must adjust its overheads to profitably match its revenues.

I hate to disappoint you, but as president and part-owner I was not the “job creator.” The market was. We were entrepreneurs and an overheated consumer market created our jobs. Neither tax rates nor regulations played a role in our decisions to hire. We had no choice but to hire as many Vermonters as we could, knowing full well that the market could shrink at any time, and when it did, so would our company.

Promoting the idea that all business leaders are “job creators” is as shallow as the assertion that all business leaders should be exempt from regulatory and statutory oversight, while the rest of us should not.

The paranoid language trumped up by those who dislike government assumes that most Americans are much less intelligent than, in fact, we are. We learn by education, example and experience. An MBA and accumulated or inherited wealth are not the only determinants of wisdom.

The obvious effort to create and embed a popular language coded deftly with terms like “free-up the job creators,” “government intrusion,” and “tax and spend,” arrogantly assumes that most Americans live in a perpetual state of fear-induced ignorance. This is frankly an insult.

We have lived through much worse: the labor abuses of the industrial revolution in the late 1800’s, The Great Depression, the self-sacrifice asked of us during World War II, and now the economic slump that was largely created by a deregulated finance industry, over-marketing, and a culture of excess consumerism. In time, this, too, will correct through the resilience of the American people and the relentless acceleration of innovation.

In fact, conservative ideologues do their own long-range business interests a terrible disservice by pretending that the current economic slump is simply the result of over-zealous government. They preclude any intelligent discussion with working Americans about the critical importance of quality education, environmental intelligence and the new impacts of automation and innovation on the future workplace.

The assumption that Americans with their collective experience must be managed like children to ensure the well-being of the job creators is self-serving and shortsighted.

Business interests have always been well cared for in this country – especially since President Reagan took office.

It would be much more productive to lead an honest conversation about our place in the global economy and the economic well-being of all Americans – and not just the privileged few.

In time and perhaps with age, we learn to doubt or at least question the predictions of gurus and futurists. Our landscapes are riddled with the remnants of “model communities” and retail and industrial endeavors that either turned out to be fads or investment pipedreams. Nature, or our “higher power,” or whomever we personally delegate with cosmic change, has a way of humbling our dreams and periodically reminding us of our rightful place in the universe.

Tropical storm Irene,  recently did so, reminding us that our peaceable kingdom can be swept away.

Watching the city of Detroit – decimated not by nature, but by man-made reversals of fortune – plow vacant residential communities under to make way for urban farming enterprises also reminds us of the ebb and flow of human enterprise. Nature’s force is inherently entropic, seemingly wanting the built environment to revert to a natural one.

Every place has built landscapes, working landscapes, and natural landscapes. For the last hundred years, Vermont has been defined by the beauty of all three. With the westward migration of sheep and dairy farming moving down off the hillsides into the fertile river valleys, much of Vermont’s former working landscape has reforested itself.

Most communities fiercely defend the growth of their built environments against out-of-scale or sore-thumb development. But who cares for the working landscape, the farmlands, forests and riparian networks out of which many Vermonters harvest renewable energy and timber, and on which they grow grains, produce, and graze animals?

The ebb and flow of human activity in the working landscape creates risks. We’ve all seen farm fields blossom into housing developments, depriving young farmers of land and infrastructure on which to begin new farming enterprises. Nature too, takes its course and fallow fields that once produced hay for livestock overgrow with alder, and prickly ash.

At the behest of the VT Council on Rural Development, a broad coalition of Vermonters, legislators, non-profits and businesses committed to maintaining this vital economic and aesthetic component of our landscape is addressing this risk, responding to studies that show that Vermont’s working landscape could well be lost within a generation without a plan for investment and stewardship.

The comprehensive plan, entitled Investing in our Farm and Forest Future, celebrates the generations of farm and forest families and entrepreneurs whose work has produced the landscape that is central to Vermont’s identity. It states that Vermont will never conserve the working landscape simply by fiat or by purchase, but must invest in the economic foundation of the land itself by supporting the farm and forest enterprises that are its stewards.

It outlines clear steps to make Vermont a national leader and to inspire, attract and nurture a creative new generation of food, farm, and forest entrepreneurs as a foundation for our future prosperity. As we celebrate and make our New Year commitments to improve our lives and communities, this will be one of mine.