An awareness of nothing has creeped into our schools and offices. What does it matter which building in which edge city reached by which highway one goes to through morning gridlock to ride the same elevator to the same hallway to the same room filled with purplish gray fabric-covered cubicles, personalized with photocopied jokes?

Social Security has been successful at fostering greater dependency on the government. Fewer and fewer Americans remain unafraid enough to live and speak as the independent freemen envisioned by the Founders. More and more elections are decided by fear of losing yet more money. Those who work fear taxes while those who don’t fear reduced benefits. Other issues, such as national security, get displaced by anxiety over what our own government might do.

Goodness is something much larger and more important than a list of rules. Mainly, it is a vision of the world as it has been and can be, a vision of people living in all the little and big ways that support happiness. Fully realized, the vision is a vast and complex ecological order, quite beyond the comprehension of children.