The young are overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage and under the pressure, Republicans, terrified of becoming irrelevant, have petitioned the court in favor of it.

But gay marriage is not about equal rights; it’s about money rights. Massachusetts can recognize same-sex marriages, but DOMA prevents same-sex couples from getting Social Security and federal benefits and pensions heterosexual couples get.

A year ago I went to a party that brought together old-timer women hockey players from a league that has played in Canton for 40 years, where both lesbian and straight couples were able to catch up on life’s vicissitudes. I spoke to an opposite sex married couple who both had high-powered careers when they married and now have two young children.

Pregnancy was not easy for them. Her doctors told her to cut back on work, but she kept miscarrying. She kept cutting back her hours. She changed jobs. Over the span of ten years she was able to have two children, but her career (not his) never recovered.

I spoke to another friend whom I love but never call and had lost almost all recent news. She’s still beautiful and energetic despite having her third child at nearly 50. The surprise child is in great health and though exhausted, she and her husband still get to the gym and try to stay fit. No, she no longer takes care of her best friend’s baby during the day for a little cash — that child’s in school now — but she’s back to doing tax returns in the spring to help make ends meet.

Women often have to stop work near the end of pregnancy for health reasons. We have our organs placed on a table for cesarean births. Our bodies are sliced in vaginal birth. We breast feed, bleed, swell and are pushed to absolute exhaustion. We can carry for 12 hopeful weeks, only to stand in the early morning hours to find blood pooling at our feet. Then we must consider what trying yet again will cost. We fall down the career ladder, or in some cases, are never able to return to a “real” job. Women with husbands can wake up pregnant at 50.

To justify giving marital protections to same-sex couples, our culture must be taught to reject the physiological realities for women married to men. To that end the bridal gown needs to be re-tailored into a one-size-fits-all garment that no longer accommodates for hips or breasts, as they must be seen as inconsequential. The uterus — just like under the abortion debate — must be transformed into a discrete, separate vessel within our bodies that can be rented or legislated or made mute, depending on the current power brokers’ needs of the moment.

Strategists know same-sex couples must be ushered into the marital institution — its very power rooted in its conventions — in order to gain the stature needed to access the financial securities membership has to offer. If all goes as planned, pairs of men who rent wombs at the most convenient times in their careers and collect the genetic package when the baking is done will have the right to the same economic benefits that were originally designed to protect pregnant women and their children. This would be “equal,” but it is not fair. It is consistent with our Darwinian culture, where the powerful increasingly get the protections of the state while the vulnerable are increasingly exposed.

So then what about the lesbian couples? Their bodies go through the exact process as a heterosexual woman’s. Shouldn’t they get the economic benefits of marriage?

Also at the party was a woman who bought a home years ago with her sister. They combine their income for the needs of their house. One has far better health insurance than the other, though both contribute dearly to their employers for health insurance.

If we say that the lesbian couple should get all the same benefits as a heterosexual couple, including Social Security, pension and shared health benefits, then on what basis would we deny those same economic benefits to the sisters? A pair of women trying to make a home is a pair of women trying to make a home. Do we parcel out Social Security or pensions or shared health insurance based on where these women may put their heads down at night? Isn’t same sex marriage based on dropping prejudice against sexual preference? Can we include abstinence as a preference?

While diminishing the biological distinctions between same-sex and opposite-sex coupling, gay marriage also needs to distinguish itself from inglorious same-sex cohabitation. For this strategy to work, no matter how irrational the justification, romantic love between two people needs to be the singular reason for the financial compensations of marriage.

Using this rationalization, lesbian women would get each other’s Social Security, pensions and health benefits; all the securities convention can bring. Cohabiting old maid sisters — a pairing as established as marriage itself — would not.

All gay marriage has done is expand the marital club to conform to another specific kind of coupling, but it is still exclusionary. It has been a campaign won through a dismissal of longstanding tradition that was rationally rooted in biology. The prize is social sanctioning from the highest order with an important side order of financial protections. But let us not pretend that the prize is equality or fairness. Polygamists need not apply and old maids can fend for themselves.

Lanza’s first victim was his own mother. All six adult victims were women. He killed 20 children. If Lanza set out to disintegrate the hearts of mothers everywhere, he succeeded.

While this man’s world argues about their guns, explains the definition of an assault weapon, talks about organ-damaging bullets, of lining guns up next to crayons; while the president creates task forces and congressmen say they are “shocked” and wait for their next cue from the NRA, brokenhearted mothers read about 52-year-old Anne Marie Murphy, whose dead body was removed from on top of her classroom’s children in a failed effort to shield her babies from bullet spray.

Only in a man’s world do we imagine movie-like intruders breaking their way into a school. Average Clark Kent teachers, with the reach of a gun, transform into a well-regulated militia and take out the intruder while rolling on the floor of the school hall and firing precision shots into the team of invaders. Citizen children spring out the windows to safety and the world is once again made secure through guns.

If teachers resist taking on this additional responsibility, this man’s world suggests the “mall cop” alternative. Cheap security, paid for by taxpayers and mandated in some way so some private security firm rakes in a nice federal contract while your kids go without art or poor kids without food stamps, but we all agree to this trade-off because the “safety of children” will become politically untouchable and no one will dare question the need for armed amateurs in the schools.

In this man’s world tragedy is instantly transformed into political expediency. It’s not hard to imagine the end of assault weapons. Obama will claim a political victory over the NRA and the NRA will wait, as they did under Clinton, for the ban to expire. Twenty children and six women killed at the possible firing rate of six bullets a second is simply not enough to permanently take “semi-automatics” out of the cold dead hands of the NRA. Meanwhile, assault weapons fly off the shelves with gun stores unable to keep them in stock.

This man’s world equates guns and freedom, but when the Black Panthers tried to emancipate their race through the showing of arms at the California State House, Governor Ronald Reagan said individuals should not have guns and California soon passed a series of gun control laws, with strong Republican backing. Forty-one years later in Arizona, an AR-15 semi-automatic was the most dramatic of open arms brought to intimidate the first black president who was there for a speech, but there was no passage of gun control laws. Clearly the NRA-funded congressional support for the right to bear arms is dependent on who it is that’s carrying the weapon. Today blacks are far more in favor of gun control than whites. Women more than men.

In this man’s world violent death becomes the path to war, to the consolidation of power, to the repression of individual freedom and expression and to the expansion of the police state — all in the name of domestic safety and national security. It will not matter how costly or ineffectual or unconstitutional these reactions are. Government will give grants for schools to purchase “safety” technology. We’ll see more mandatory use of RF identifications — invented for cattle and already used in some Texas schools — that can monitor the wearer’s exact location. Whatever the specific form it takes, schools will function like prisons and we will acclimate to it as we did to the post 9/11 stripping of our privacy and constitutional rights.

Lanza shot his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School. A buzzing system didn’t help that. Cameras wouldn’t have stopped him. Lanza used his mother’s assault weapons so a background check wouldn’t have helped. He never got the chance to use all his bullets, so a bullet quota system seems more political than practical. He killed himself, as they often do, so the usual call for the death penalty has gone unheard. And having Rambo in every school as a practical solution is pure male fantasy.

Through a softer lens violence is much simpler and tragic. Senseless things happen. Rationally considering our policies around not just guns, but mental illness lacks glory. Using more federal dollars to arm teachers with the educational resources they need doesn’t have the drama of arming them with guns or installing cameras or guards, but would help the nation’s children far more.

Softer solutions that look at the larger consequences of our actions take time to develop but don’t carry the impact of “deploying’’ retired police officers in flack jackets with semi’s on their shoulders. Regardless of what the NRA thinks, our schools are not war zones. Our children are not inmates in protective custody. Yet we know that whatever the reaction to Sandy Hook, it will be intrusive and disproportionate and expand through time. Meanwhile women are holding their children close and wondering how, in this man’s world, to keep their babies safe.

The Shaun Ouillette memorial stone at St. Mary's cemetery

Helena Findlen arrives without her boss. Police Chief Ken Berkowitz cannot attend because his father-in-law died this morning. The words Chief Berkowitz worked on for weeks in preparation for today will be read by Findlen. She laughs at the over-the-counter reading glasses she is wearing, though time has impacted little else on the deputy chief. It’s still easy to see why, in her youth, she was the winner of the international Rose of Tralee beauty contest. Twenty-four years of being on the police force has hardened nothing in her visage or her tenor.

Another car arrives and Beth Erickson steps out. Findlen is one of a few who know that Erickson, the editor of this newspaper, is at the center of the team that today is fighting entropy. Beverly Beckham, a close friend of Erickson’s and a well-known columnist who wrote many pieces for the Boston Herald about what happened all those years ago, is here too, along with a few relatives and friends.

A team of motorcycle riders are already in place. Harleys and black leather jackets and bandannas have long since lost their “Hells Angels” bad boy reputation and today seem almost synonymous with charity. On the back of the jackets is stamped an American eagle with “Post 24 American Legion.” These are the men and women who worked with Andreotti to help raise money for the stone.

It’s just a matter now for the Canton High chorus to arrive along with students from the Boomerang Project, CHS Principal Derek Folan, and Superintendent of Schools Jeff Granatino. None were part of Canton High when one of their own was killed and another left to grow up behind gated walls. But the administrators know that the schools and the Canton police have a protocol to exchange information on troubled kids in part because of what happened on another November day, long before the students attending today were born.

Jeanne Quinn, a Vietnam veteran, pushes her daughter Yvonne in her wheelchair up to the now ready circle. Andreotti worked on Quinn’s behalf for her to receive funds toward the memorial that bears the name of her 14-year-old son.

On November 20, 1986, Canton freshman Shaun Ouillette was brought to the “Canton pits” on a false pretense and hit repeatedly over the head with a baseball bat by classmate Rod Matthews. Before the murder, Matthews had written an anonymous note and left it in a box at Canton High School, saying that he wanted to light houses on fire and was afraid he would kill someone. Two Canton High students knew Matthews had a list of students he had thought about killing and that he had turned his focus on Shaun.

Shaun was missing for weeks until one of the students, who did not believe Matthews when he said he had killed Shaun, was shown the lifeless body. During one of many sleepless nights, the student returned to the pits, made careful notes on where Shaun’s body was located, and then left an anonymous note with police.

Speaking to the gathered circle, Findlen reminded the group that in 1986 there was no Columbine, no national awareness, as there is today, that outrageous threats can become shocking reality. There was no protocol in place on how to deal with rumors, bullying, fears or threats of classmate violence.

What is not widely known was that after Shaun’s murder, Findlen applied for a highly competitive national grant that would help finance a system that would streamline communication between the schools, troubled students, and the police. In her grant application she explained the tragedy at Canton High School and that if there had been a method for dealing with the anonymous note and a safe place for the students to report what Matthews was saying to them, that perhaps the murder could have been stopped. Findlen feels Canton got the grant in part because of Shaun’s story. Today, Detective Chip Yeaton is the school resource officer with an office at Canton High School.

When Findlen announced to the gathering that the program would, from this day forward, be named after Shaun, Quinn put her hand to her mouth. Yvonne was emotional throughout the ceremony, but Andreotti never left her side and seemed to know just when to grip her arm to console her. Yeaton then brought the plaque that would hang in his office, which has Shaun’s photograph, for both to see.

The murder was something many in Canton would rather forget, perhaps because it may have been preventable. Blame and cruel remarks were widespread during the trial and in the aftermath. Anyone who has watched Quinn in this impossible journey could say that her greatest dread is that her son’s short life will be forgotten. That no one will remember that he went to Canton High. That he was here, on this planet, however briefly.

With the announcement, it was as if entropy itself was shoved back. Students who come to Yeaton’s office will know that there once was a Canton High student named Shaun Ouillette who may have been saved by this very program had such a thing existed then. And there is the stone monument that stands against time at St. Mary’s cemetery.

Certainly the monument for the boy whose stone reads “Forever Young” will once again be covered by November leaves. The plaque that hangs in the school resource office at the high school will blend with the wall in time. Entropy, after all, always wins. But because of the efforts of a small group of people, its victory has been delayed, perhaps for decades. More importantly, a mother’s and sister’s forever pain has been softened.

Operation Impound the Pounds: Zero tolerance for anything over 200 calories ("during school hours")

The law impacts all vending machines and a la carte foods. Apparently the state backed off when it came to fundraisers on school property, and so the fat snack prohibitions are only in effect a half hour before school starts and a half hour after school ends — that way goodies can still be sold at school events.

Canton School Committee Chairman John Bonnanzio was beside himself with disbelief when details of the law were brought before the committee in May and again in July by the “Wellness Committee.” He was surprised by the lack of parent “kick back” by this “overreach of government.” (He had expressed similar concerns in his “cookie” speech at the CHS graduation last spring.) He got some support by School Committee members, who mentioned that while there is this great concern around cookies, soda and cupcakes, kids can order hotdogs every day and are served chicken nuggets for lunch and other highly processed foods.

Ready for the chairman’s cynicism by their second exchange, the school nurse leader and the school wellness coordinator wielded the “shame on you” finger like a magic wand upon Bonnanzio as only those employed by a school system can, dubbing him a “Debbie Downer.” The spell had its intended effect, and the chairman found himself apologizing for his poor attitude. But the righteous march of protecting public health may have unintended consequences, and the recoiling instincts of Bonnanzio and others like him around these laws may well be justified.

In his book “Tyranny of Health — doctors and the regulation of lifestyle,” Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick warned a decade ago of a world view toward authoritarian health policies. In his words, we are pushing toward “miserable abstinence.” Nobody embodies the Nanny Government more than New York’s Mayor Bloomberg with his recent ban on the super-sized soda. His supporters have rightly pointed out that soda is cheap, so if prices are brought up by 20 percent but you double the size, people think they’re getting a bargain. If government can’t step in where profit comes at the expense of public health, what good is government at all?

Thus we are back to Bonnanzio’s shame. Where is the balance between public health and personal choice? Society has decided wearing a seatbelt is not a personal choice, but a law. It’s still legal to smoke cigarettes, but know you’ll be segregated like a contagion. And though we now look at alcoholics as having a disease, we are moving toward thinking of those with heart disease as lacking self-control. There is something bizarre about this safety and fitness march, turning us into a white-knuckled culture where we fear everything from food to sex. Big Brother doesn’t always know best, and though there are no simple answers, the waggers of the shame finger would be well served to have at least some suspicions when it comes to these goodie two-shoes policies.

There is something parsimonious about these health laws, measuring pleasure by the ounce, bubble wrapping our children and helicoptering over what lawmakers see as inept parents. They feel life can only be served a drip at a time, cautiously — perhaps agonizingly — until there is simply too little of it to satisfy a person with any thirst for it.

Schools have always been the trial balloon for warrantless searches, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, and now social engineering. School children can’t vote and are subjected to the whims of irrational policy every day. It’s why we couldn’t wait to graduate. So we could be free of these arbitrary restrictions and live our own lives as adults.

But government may soon be our new principal, all of our surroundings a kind of rule-ridden school grounds, and we reduced to children. In the words of the U.S. Circuit Court, we can have “no reasonable expectation of privacy,” and so how long will it be before monitoring technology is used to fine-tune our personal habits and penalize us when we disobey?

Built-in GPS knows how fast we go on York Street and Route 138. Our cars know if we buckle. How long do you think it will be before our car computers upload our driving data to our insurance companies and our rates are based on our habits and not on actual accidents or speeding tickets? How far off are we from having our health premiums impacted by how much soda is on our Stop & Shop cards or by how much booze is associated with our IDs? Or by how many times a year our YMCA card gets swiped?

The finger of shame will point and say how you shouldn’t be speeding anyway. How you should buckle up. Exercise more. How dangerous York Street is. That soda is no good for you and maybe you do buy too much wine. That if you have nothing to hide — if you behaved how your parents, teachers, bosses, fitness coach, and government tell you to behave — you wouldn’t mind being monitored and you’d be safe and healthy.

The School Committee had expressed reasonable frustration when they talked about needing to become food police while state mandates didn’t allow enough time for students to sit and eat, forcing kids to grab unhealthy snack food. It’s a brilliant observation. Aren’t most of our bad choices the consequence of too little time? Whether it be fast food, fast driving, or multi-tasking? But cutting back on the entrenched eight-plus-hour work day isn’t even in our consciousness.

By their third encounter on August 30, the School Committee said they could live with the new regulations and apologized as a group to the school nurse. At the end of the day, how much does it matter if kids can no longer buy cookies or high-calorie food? But we as adults should look to the schools as our canary in the coal mine. In the coming years, watch for changes in your vending machine at work, how the contents of your lunchbox is judged, or for a nearly mandated exercise program. Our BMI can easily be interpreted as the literal embodiment of our self-discipline and work ethic — the new gold standard for promotion and the modern measure by which our character is judged.

May’s Atlantic magazine has an article asking if our constant connection to Facebook is making us lonely. Newsweek (July) is more dire, claiming that social networks are literally making us crazy. A recent New Yorker cover has a drawing of a vacationing family of four staring into their smartphones as paradise behind them goes unobserved.

I’m not sure when they overtook the culture of their time, if articles asked if television made us lonely or if moving from horse-drawn carriages to steel-encased cars increased anxiety, but I think there is no denying that technology, when overused, can lead to isolation.

When I was young I remember going into relatives’ and friends’ houses where the television was always blaring. My father would come home and rant about the “boob tube” and how there is no conversation “these days,” but I was a child then so I didn’t experience the living room’s transition from a place for beverage and laughter and conversation to where the television served as the guest of honor. I simply didn’t appreciate how rude it was for a host to ignore their company and expect that their guests become hypnotized with them in front of the light of the box.

I appreciate it now. I have given up on women my age who are so addicted to texting that we can’t have a sustained conversation over coffee. Now that the kids are older and no longer the source of constant interruption, my contemporaries have found this new disruptor whose beeps draw them away faster than a crying child and whose cyber needs they find far more engaging than physical company.

After Canton’s Honor Guard buried its 400^th solider, Veterans Agent Tony Andreotti invited his guard, as is his tradition, to the Honey Dew up on Neponset Street. Bob DeYeso, who is of my father’s generation, sang an old World War II song. Eyes rolled and Tony’s band gibed Mr. DeYeso in a style that comes only with the kind of relationship you get when you spend endless hours with someone. The men and one woman, Arline Love, their bugler, sipped coffee and talked and laughed and reminisced. Not one stared into a cell phone. Never were they distracted by the television in the far off corner. They were able to give all their attention and energies to each other, as if doing so was natural.

Veterans enjoying a conversation without modern distractions

Maybe my generation, who grew up with the television in the middle of the living room, never developed the art of conversation to the extent our parents did, and so maybe we have no immunization against flashing technologies.

In the 1980s cocaine was everywhere. In a decade when working endless hours was associated with importance, cocaine had prestige. It kept you up and going, but it didn’t take long before we also saw the consequences. Cell phones are this era’s efficiency drug. But the energy we lose by never being in the now scrambles our focus. In our effort to be efficient, we are left sick and exhausted, but we keep using.

The Newsweek article says there is a growing belief that being constantly wired accelerates our lives to addictive speeds. To cope, we’ve become a society on anxiety medications, which we accept because they are doctor prescribed and therefore must be okay. The article claims a couple was so pre-occupied with gaming that they failed to feed their baby, while others have gotten blood clots from sitting too long. It says cyber use promotes OCD and ADHD. Psychiatry next year will officially recognize cyber addiction as a disorder, and there is increasing evidence that the devices are re-wiring the way our brains work, making us unable to think deeply about important issues.

This isn’t to say that Facebook and our “social networks” cannot be used as tools to help us invest in our relationships. Experts in social media in the Atlantic article say they can do that, and I think those of us who use them agree. But like alcohol, which is a wonderful tool to relax and be social with, moderation is the key. A smartphone is much like television — it can bring us the world, but we have to use it in cautionary doses. The real world is what’s in front of us. We just have to pick our heads up out of the hand-held flashing box long enough to see it.

Maybe that’s why I enjoyed watching Tony Andreotti’s honor guard having coffee with each other and talking and laughing right after a funeral. They take life in the present. Maybe, after a certain age and after you burry so many, you know full well that the now as well as the here is all we have.

The housing crisis is something that’s not easy to understand. From the Right we hear it was the Clinton Administration’s fault — that the liberals wanted everybody to own a home, relaxing lending standards so that “less desirables” were able to get loans, thus dragging responsible people into the Great Recession. It is true that banks operated under increasingly relaxed lending practices, lobbied by the lending institutions themselves so that large banks, like Bank of America, could make as many loans as possible, bundle them under false protections, and sell them off to state pensions and the like as an attractive investment. But of course the mortgage defaults set in, the insurances to protect on defaults were bogus, yet the bankers who created the crisis got bailed out and the mortgage holders and pension investors and the taxpayers got stuck.

Old news. The scary news is that “Citizens United” — the legal whoring system where legislators prostitute themselves for campaign dollars in exchange for corporations dictating taxation and regulations — is going to make the deregulation of the banking system look like the baby steps Dick Cheney took while cutting his dirty-trick teeth under the Nixon administration. As one friend said to me when connecting these dots, we are going to start looking like Argentina.

The money in Washington that’s needed to get elected is staggering. I no longer bother to send my ridiculous $25 to candidates, the absurdity of it now clear. I’m better off taking my pathetic 25 bucks to one of the inevitable casinos that’ll open up soon in a town near you and placing it on the blackjack table. Getting something for doing nothing is what the fast exchange of money is all about — it’s the American way. When one pyramid scam fails, deregulate and legalize another. Banks gambling on bundling brought disaster, so now we are looking to casinos to save us — literally betting on a house of cards for jobs and tax revenue. But voters have to understand that when those we work for control who we vote for, the House always wins.

In this election year Obama talks of the return of the car industry in an attempt to make us feel that America is back on track. Meanwhile, amongst the abandoned properties, 50,000 stray dogs roam Detroit. I remember when I went to Puerto Rico in the early 1990s I was shocked by all the stray and dead dogs in the streets. I thought, this is what happens when you have a dysfunctional government. That of course was before Detroit and New Orleans. Now the dysfunctional government is Mainland USA.

I recently visited the home of my tax accountant and braced for what I owe. I’m working class, so naturally I’m heavily taxed. She spoke to me as if she were breaking bad medical news to a patient. As she explained why I owed so much, my mind wondered. I thought if we might soon return to the maligned “progressive tax” system, only reflecting our current values, where the less you earn, the higher your taxes. So if you earn under 25K a year, you’re taxed at 50 percent. Between 25 and 75K, 40 percent, with your taxes going down at intervals until you hit $2 million, where you’ll need all your money to create valet and shoe-shiner jobs, so you go tax-free. We can call it the “Income Incentive Program” where the government rewards you for making more money. It sounds like an absurdity, but I can see it getting traction in some Republican campaign, Rush endorsing it and the working class cheering it on.

A congressman on NPR’s “This American Life” said he needs to raise $15,000 a day to stay in office. If a person needed $15,000 a day for his drug addiction we’d all know he’d have to commit crimes to sustain it. The same is so for congress, only we’ve made Washington’s criminal behavior legal. It would be as if it were legal for a drug addict to break into your home and take your stuff to support his habit, but Washington’s crimes to sustain the corporate/legislator prostitution ring are actually less honest because crimes are committed against you, but you don’t even know you’ve been taken.

The Right’s resurrection of Ayn Rand’s world of “winner takes all” as reflected in her most influential disciple, Alan Greenspan, is a value we continue to embrace despite the obvious consequences. Any sharing or mercy is deemed socialism and weakness. My most vulnerable friends hate “Obama Care,” the very people who could most benefit by it. They are sprayed with Rush and Fox and anger and hate until they can no longer see their own best interests.

I forget where I read it, but someone described the former Soviet Union as a place of utter depression, where its populace roamed in a state of hopeless despair. Here, we are not so much depressed as we are terrified. We see how a job loss can quickly equal home foreclosure, something extremely rare until this recession. We look at our retirements and see there is less money in it than the dollars we contributed after years of investments. Clever fees and systems beyond our working class understanding nibble away at our life savings, and we have been robbed, though we don’t quite know by whom or how. We fear joblessness. We fear retirement. We fear the vulnerability of age. We fear the future. And yet we malign the very social safety nets that pad the devastation of these inevitabilities.

Maybe it’s because, as Americans, we are indoctrinated to believe we are not part of the super vulnerable but part of the super strong — the one who will emerge as the winner of the “Hunger Games.” That we are faster, stronger, smarter, and when necessary, even more ruthless than those around us, making us believe in our inevitable success. As Americans we tend to lean toward an inflated view of self, fantasizing about our future stardom and clever plans, eagerly waiting for the day when the world will appreciate and pay us dearly for our unique talents. Our pitiless politics reflects our self-deception, until time sweeps away our delusions and we are left with the consequences of our collective arrogance.

Canton voters will be asked in April to vote on taxes at the booth and on town meeting floor. Fortunately, in a small arena like Canton, political “reason” has a fighting chance, even when dealing with taxes.

On April 3 in the voting booth, residents will be asked whether they support a real estate surcharge for the Community Preservation Act. It is an increase in property taxes, done by formula that mitigates the impact on homes with abatements, etc. Simply, it’ll cost about $44 a year for a person who owns a $450,000 home. That pool of money has to be spent in specific ways but includes affordable housing, preserving historic sites, recreation and walking trails. Currently that pool of money is matched by the state at 25 percent. Before money from CPA can be spent, a panel of what might be considered pragmatists and idealists (selectmen, Planning Board members and conservationists) will put various ideas of spending the money through a vetting process, and the final proposals must be approved at town meeting floor.

The Canton Association of Business and Industry (CABI) asked the Board of Selectmen to take a position on CPA. CABI President Gene Manning said the organization opposes CPA, arguing that the timing is bad and that it will have a negative impact on business growth. It seemed that local businesses were looking to the selectmen for support against the CPA. The CABI president wanted to be clear that the association supported the override in 2008 (businesses pay $24.23 per thousand in property taxes while residents pay $11.91) and feels Canton may require another override in the future, but he seemed to hint that the money brought in by CPA is too restrictive in how it can be spent.

Despite the business plea for support, Selectman Victor Del Vecchio said he felt that unless the vote has a huge impact on the town, it isn’t really the place of the selectmen to take a stand on how residents should vote in the booth. He said articles on town meeting floor are different — there the selectmen have a duty to take a stand — but philosophically he seemed to feel the voting booth is a kind of sanctuary where the opinion of the board has no place. Selectman Sal Salvatori agreed with Del Vecchio, saying that the board made its opinion clear when CPA was an article before town meeting last year.

Then, to use a line from “A Christmas Story,” Selectman Avril Elkort made a slight breach of etiquette, going straight for the triple-dog dare. Rather than discussing whether the selectmen should take a stand on the issue, she went right into why the CPA is a bad idea, saying too many people are hurting right now for it to pass. Chairman John Connolly agreed, saying the board made a stand on the override vote and that he too felt the CPA was a bad idea, citing in the past that he did not like the strings attached as to how the town can spend the money. The floodgates opened, a vote as to whether the selectmen should take a stand on CPA now irrelevant, and both Salvatori and Bob Burr said that they too opposed CPA.

Del Vecchio, his voice of metered reason trampled in the emotion of his impassioned fellow board members, was now caught in the terrible dilemma of having to contradict himself. He said he was for the CPA, saying the town had already lost $4 million from not passing the measure when it had the chance a few years ago, and while that was a lost opportunity, it would be better to take advantage of the funding late rather than never.

Manning is a reasonable man. So is Del Vecchio. It is not as if the CABI is against all taxation. And Del Vecchio is no tree hugger. They both would have to be categorized as pragmatists. But philosophically they come from different places. Manning does not like the idea that CPA restricts the way it allows you to spend money. For Del Vecchio, the strings attached in exchange for the state funds is not an issue.

The local meals tax, which comes up again this year on town meeting floor, is exactly the opposite. In a way, it’s a “match fund” because sources will include dinners from outside of Canton. The Finance Committee sponsored it. Some members would like to see that money for OPEB (Other Post Employment Benefits), which is an obligation to retired town employees that is currently unfunded. Because it is an outstanding obligation, funding OPEB will help Canton’s bond rating as lenders become more nervous about these kinds of outstanding municipal obligations. Dave Emhardt of FinCom doesn’t like the meals tax precisely because it doesn’t do what CPA does — you can’t earmark it for a specific purpose. He would support the meals tax if he knew the money would go to OPEB, but he seems to hate the idea of just another tax sinking into the abyss of the general fund.

The chairman of the School Committee, John Bonnanzio, faced a similar dilemma when he recently came before FinCom. FinCom Chairman Alan Hines asked that the School Committee take a vote on the meals tax so that they might present themselves as a united front on town meeting floor. But Bonnanzio is philosophically against the meals tax, with feelings similar to Emhardt. He would love to see the money earmarked for the special education stabilization fund — another prudent fiscal move — but he seemed much less enamored with the idea of the tax plopping into the general fund.

CPA money, estimated at $525,000 annually, will be earmarked toward specific goals after a very long vetting process and have state matching funds of about 25 percent. The meals tax, estimated at $300,000 annually, has to go into the general fund and can be used for anything the town sees fit, yet will be subsidized by non-residents eating in Canton. The good news is that Canton voters can make a clear decision based on good information and their personal interests and philosophy — something very different from the usual ideological arguments on taxation.

We were done with the Bush Family Coup, starting with Bush Senior, who, as head of the CIA, traded arms to Iran in exchange for their holding American hostages until after the election, guaranteeing Ronald Reagan’s victory over then President Carter. In exchange, Bush became Reagan’s vice president and then president. His son “W” would then be decreed as ruler of the land not once, but twice, under dubious circumstances.

To put this in perspective, can you imagine our reaction if the former head of the KGB made a secret arms deal with Iran behind the back of his president to get a buddy elected and in exchange became second in command and then president of the Soviet Union? Only to have his son become president after the government had ordered officials to stop counting the votes, all while claiming their country had free elections? We would have called it a laughable absurdity.

We were also done with Karl Rove and Cocaine Republicans like Rush Limbaugh, made obese and deaf from obscene self-indulgences. That Obama was thin and black and an intellectual — the antithesis of these bloated gray ticks passing as men — helped. We heard Obama smoked, but if this were his only poor habit we knew he couldn’t be destroyed by some silly vice like enjoying the close company of women — unforgivable in sexually infantile America.

We liberals watched Obama focus on an ineffectual health care package for the sake of posterity while Americans continued to lose jobs. The Great Liberal Hope acted as we might expect the oil rich Bushes to react when black blood hemorrhaged from the center of the earth and BP’s public relations machine was the nation’s central information on the event. Worried self-funded photographers, working on their own, showed their pictures of slicked earth and birds to empty halls, one coming to the Canton library, their contradicting photos ignored or dismissed as exaggerations by the main media.

Guantanamo, an atrocity, stayed open with no means for it to ever be closed, frightening as the definition of “terrorist” continues to expand. Obama’s fiscal reforms, his supporters say, saved us from another great depression, but his constant compromises weakens his efforts, and so his repairs have been anemic at best.

But on New Year’s Eve President Obama did something that even hope-blinded liberals should not forgive: He signed the “National Defense Authorization Act” (NDAA), which includes a provision that gives the president the authority to lock up dissidents indefinitely without trial. It all comes under “terrorism” and at first glance seems like it’ll be used to keep us safe from those bad Semites (sound familiar?), but the order is vague enough to round up any group that may protest the status quo.

Martin Luther King is celebrated for protesting the status quo. At an assembly on the Friday before the MLK holiday, Galvin Middle School social studies teacher Elaine McCarthy, using a well-orchestrated multimedia presentation, brought to life for students a time when blacks were separated from whites, forced to sit in the back of the bus and unable to attend school with white children.

Segregation must seem like an absurdity to the students at the Galvin Middle School. It must seem obvious to them that people in those primitive times had something wrong with their thinking. But it wasn’t obvious then. What was obvious then was that blacks needed to be separated from whites as a more savage, less evolved race; that the children of whites should not be exposed to them, no more than children should be exposed to violence or pornography. It was only through upheaval and protest, through social revolution and marches and through an open justice system, that the laws and the very hearts of people were changed.

Can you imagine if President Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover had the powers our president holds today? John Lennon would have been deported before he could finish singing “Give Peace a Chance,” and we’d still be fighting communism in Vietnam. Would Malcolm X and Martin Luther King have been held indefinitely without trial as enemy combatants? And now that workers are being systematically kenneled to the back of the economic bus, will we be free to protest our circumstances? Or will the wide net that monitors every American’s email and communication be able to identify dangerous thinkers and organizations early, sweeping them away before they can disrupt the pyramid of power?

If it is true that “only the underdog believes in equality,” then the underdog must be chained to his stake. Though the links were forged by W’s administration, what a tremendous paradox it is that the stake should be driven in by the nation’s first black president, whose very election could only come about by the works of dissident underdogs like MLK.

We liberals had hoped for so much better. Though he may speak eloquently of justice, Obama’s actions continue to put us on a terrifying slope as a country. Self-censorship and nationalistic pride are the prizes won for nations that combine fear with indoctrination. We believe the lies we are fed, learn disdain for the weak and to applaud the powerful. We salute them, obediently toss a musket on our shoulder and march off to defend their interests, leaving our own to wilt in the unattended fields of our forgotten hopes.

Grover Norquist had his Republicans — and I do mean “his” Republicans — sign a no-new-taxes pact, which means the budget would have to be balanced by downsizing working class people’s benefits (Social Security, health care, unemployment, education loans) while continuing with the tax status quo: no tax increases on the super rich. If the Republicans don’t do as their boss tells them, Norquist won’t use his bundled corporate lobby dollars to fund them and they’ll lose their next election.

The destruction of the working class helps no one, yet the relentless march toward it continues. Government needs to spend like a drunken sailor on infrastructure and labor-intense projects to get Americans back to work. Ask Japan, which remains depressed after it attempted to balance its budget when it fell into its crisis in 2003 and consequently remains there. The tsunami didn’t help, but bad luck never has mercy on the down and out. Here in the U.S., because of the Super Committee’s failure to fulfill an economically suicidal objective, in 2013 the Feds will make $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts from the federal budget, though that includes a half trillion from the Pentagon, which is the Republicans’ darling. It will be interesting to see how Norquist’s political army navigates that part of the deal. After all, what red-blooded American could possibly be for cuts in military spending?

Of course, the federal problems don’t happen “out there” in a vacuum. The U.S. tsunami will come in the form of staggering federal cuts, crippling government regulations and economic safety nets all in the name of economic expansion. States will be less supported by the Feds, so towns will see less money from the states. The government will stop counting the longtime unemployed, but the unemployment reality and jobs with livable wages will remain dire.

We continue to hear increasing numbers of homes lost in auction, driving down values. Wall Street can privatize its gains and pass its losses off to taxpayers — that the treasury can afford — but vast joblessness and home loss is a sign of personal failing, and any government help deemed “socialism,” so while executives use tax dollars for bonuses, every day people watch their neighbors lose their homes and their own home values dip, while corporate interests, having robbed the treasury, say now is the time for a balanced budget.

The state’s prostituting itself for casino jobs for the connected will hardly help, though maybe for the rest of us, the idea of sitting at the slots and hoping for a little trickle-down theory, especially if the drinks are cheap, might at least mitigate the despair.

This is what the “audacity of hope” looks like when it becomes public policy: Put what’s left of your miserable earnings on the roulette table and have the audacity to hope you can double your money and pay the bills. Massachusetts has even set aside a little fund so you can go to a self-help group and talk about how your lack of character is the cause of your destitution and pray to some higher power for help, because god knows the powers that be won’t help you.

The Salah Meeting Room at town hall is where sagging revenue plays out locally. This year, Finance Committee member Jim Sims is going after the school contracts, and unlike last year, he’s gathering the contracts very early, tediously examining them for all to see in a slide show. (You can see the slides on Canton Community TV’s webpage under the FinCom meeting of November 14. Part 2 continues at the FinCom on December 8.) By the time the slide show stops, the teachers’ unions will be the cause for the budget crisis in Canton — a theme that will echo throughout the state.

This isn’t to say that Finance Committee member Pat Johnson is wrong when she said last year that the teacher steps and lanes (a fancy way to increase teacher pay fast) were simply unsustainable. And it could be reasonably argued that 55 — the age of an executive leader’s prime — is way too young to start collecting a pension. Pensions were never meant to be collected for more years than the person worked. But unions didn’t cause this mess any more than Social Security caused the current federal crisis, but I suspect they both will pay a disproportionate share when it comes to closing the fiscal gap.

Nobody will ever put up a slide show on the real economic cost of federal, state and local subsidies and grants and tax breaks to large businesses. Whether it be the makers of skin or tacos, each town’s Economic Development Committee is delighted to have a business take up space in a vacant industrial building. But local real-estate tax cuts, combined with state “incentives” and in some cases even federal dollars, is so convoluted that it obfuscates the real cost to taxpayers.

As sure as taxes on us, the anger in the year to come and in 2013 will be on “entitlement programs” — a brilliant renaming and degenerative term for Social Security and federal insurances workers have paid into their entire lives — and on municipal unions.

Term limits was a primitive attempt to overthrow Congress with puppet politicians, but it’s no longer necessary. That’s why you never hear about it anymore. Now corporations can throw any amount of money they want at campaigns, bundling their dollars for common objectives where they will package politicians like products, jettisoning incumbents at will. Members of Congress will go from looking like Walter Cronkite to Robin Meade. Models and actors who can’t get work in films or Broadway will not only have television news as an option, but a gig in Congress.

This is the America we are rapidly moving toward, and by 2016 the system will be perfected and the army of the oligarchs cemented in place.

A picture’s worth a thousand words: Men in tuxedos look down from a party at the Four Seasons hotel as people in the streets protest corporate greed and economic inequality during the October 15 “Occupy Boston” event. (Tanya Willow photo)

On October 15, my family went to the Boston Book Festival to hear Pulitzer Prize winning and nominated authors speak on the dangers of a lost economic decade on scientific progress. Later that Saturday we found ourselves swept in the passions of “Occupy Boston,” which marched past the Trinity Church near the Boston Public Library where the festival was taking place — a movement which on that day had spread across the country and the world.

Before Saturday I was sure that we Americans would be immersed in our virtual worlds while our real world collapsed around us — our debt hopeless; our jobs transient; our liberties vanished. We would blame immigrants. The liberal media. Government regulations. With new laws that allowed corporations to blatantly buy elections, the American experiment of the self-governed seemed all but over.

After Saturday I wonder if perhaps there is hope for this republic.

In 1978, 30 years before the start of the great economic cataclysm we are now struggling with, I graduated from high school. By the time I graduated from Curry College in Milton in the early 1980s, like now, around 10 percent were unemployed. My tuition was subsidized by Social Security (a young widow/student benefit Reagan eliminated in 1981) and was relatively low so, unlike today, most of us started life with little debt.

I came out of college and worked part-time jobs with no benefits for several years. Even today, few in my circle have jobs with pensions, just worthless mutual funds stripped bare by invisible managing fees. I recently read an article that mine is a severely underpaid graduating class. We have an aversion to risk-taking. We do not aggressively seek raises. We don’t hop from employer to employer for opportunity. We hang on to what we have and feel lucky to have it. We started our careers with lower wages, and statistics show time has not helped us to catch up.

I fear that these terrible times will produce a graduating class similar to my own — a group that lives at home too long in a kind of indefinite adolescence. A group that has no confidence in its ability to earn money, lacks financial self-worth, and slumbers into the responsibilities of adulthood in the mid-afternoon of life.

Hard economic times create hard political views. My contemporaries are right wing. We loved Reagan, who shed us of our Vietnam shame and made war popular again. We chanted for the nuking of Iran and blamed welfare mothers for our economic troubles. (Immigrants weren’t given a thought.) If the mentally ill, who were de-institutionalized, ended up freezing in the streets, it was because they wanted to be homeless. If you failed in early 1980s America it was because you weren’t trying hard enough.

The difference between this generation and mine is that rather than blaming the least powerful for their problems, they are accusing the puppet masters — the infamous 1 percent — and voicing their accusations on the streets, which at least seems more self-determining than how my age group coped with joblessness, with inner shame and outward cruelty.

Within 24 hours, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who has been groomed for years to be the nation’s next corporate president, went from calling the Occupiers “dangerous” to saying he “worries about the 99 percent.” And Governor Patrick — who has an attraction to opulence (curtains and Cadillacs) and who has snuggled his nose against the necks of the most powered corporations — came striding down to speak with the protesters without his entourage, stage flats and television lights.

Congressmen Barney Frank was at Wheaton College recently and was asked by my husband if the Occupy movement was putting pressure on Congress. He said they were putting more pressure on the grass under their feet. The following day, at Canton’s Town Hall, Congressman Stephen Lynch was asked the same question. He said in essence that the Occupiers’ message is too broad to be effective.

Perhaps Congress today is so accustomed to having specific legislation written for them by lobbyists that they no longer can comprehend “broad” public needs. “End the War. Tax the Rich.” “How’s the war economy working out for you?” or “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one” can only be fixed through laws Congress itself would have to write. But that legislation would run contrary to the 1 percent’s agenda, and so our representatives shrug their shoulders and act as if they have no idea what the Occupiers are talking about.

But “We the People” can still vote, and so the always gutless Democrats aren’t sure if they should hook their wagon on this train. Great numbers of people protesting instinctively against forces over which they have no control is by its nature unpredictable and easily infiltrated. Nixon had the Teamsters smash heads to horrify the public during anti-war protests. It would not take much to discredit the Occupiers, and no politician wants to be affiliated with something that could go so easily and terrifyingly awry.

Yet the sheer organization of the Occupy movement is formidable, smartly using social networks to gain the public’s attention while the media ignored or berated them. And they are not all young. I was struck by the number of baby carriages in the street Saturday. As the marchers look more and more like voters, Congress may have to get up from their breakfast tables with lobbyists and look out the window and down at the street to those they are supposed to be representing.

While the protesters headed toward Boylston Street, the three authors speaking in the Trinity Church talked of an approach to life that lies in the rational. Despite the church setting, the promise that the meek shall inherit the earth and that the rewards for those born to be ruled comes after death was remote. Here the approach of the ancient Greeks was evoked — the idea that Being is transitory, yet all the universe, the inhabiters of this earth included, is made up of the same eternal material. That for us, meaning to our lives is found when we realize this brief incarnation in the mortal world is enough. That in politics and life, there are no saviors.

As a marcher’s sign so succinctly expressed, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”