I'm watching Obama's Father's Day speech (text and video here, and he is really an astonishing speaker. It's hard to put into words...so talented as a politician, but he also speaks with such honesty and integrity about the importance of kindness and compassion, acknowledging that while it's hard to encourage and live those out in the context of government, stating that the well-being of the citizenry is what government is supposed to be for. It's not to make Dick Cheney richer, or to give the Shrub a cataclysmic arena in which to work out his daddy issues. It's a common cause, certainly for defense against aggression, but more generally because that's how we survive. In the absence of claws or big sharp teeth, community is how humanity survived. People should help each other.