The late New York Times columnist William Safire once predicted the end of a civil public debate by citing a key fact understood by commercial businesses – and ignored by the politicians.

What businesses understand is that there’s no percentage in disparaging the product of a competitor. If a Corn Flakes manufacturer, for example, trashes another company’s similar breakfast cereal, the prospective customer remembers only one thing — that that breakfast cereal is bad.

What is environmentalism? Does the word encourage learning about the natural world, or is it more about not building on that vacant lot near my own home?

This issue is playing out again in that undeveloped area between Santa Cruz and Live Oak known as the Arana Gulch greenbelt. It’s a fascinating battle, one that pits environmentalists versus environmentalists—cycling advocates versus those opposed to any development there at all.

Center stage in the drama is the Santa Cruz Tarplant, a native species that’s part of the sunflower family. The inoffensive and endangered plant is the focus of a debate as to whether a bike path connecting Brommer Street to Broadway ought to be built.

I’d like to invite every “housed” person in our community to join me in a “thought experiment.” It’s pretty simple. When you climb into bed tonight, pull the covers over you and look up at the ceiling, pause for a moment and imagine that you are homeless.

Imagine you’re about to go to sleep under a tree or a bridge somewhere … you’re on a piece of damp cardboard with a couple of dirty blankets. You haven’t had a shower in several days (you had one after waiting for a few hours at the homeless center last week). As you try to go to sleep, think about what you’re wearing: the same clothes you wore all day today…and yesterday and the day before. Imagine how safe you are feeling with no walls around you and no door to lock. Imagine that every material thing you have is in a single bag, which you are using as a pillow. Now imagine that it’s starting to rain…and you hear footsteps approaching.

One of the great, unsung hassles of the nomadic life turns out to be not the actual migrations and moving, but magazine subscriptions. I need reading material almost as much as I need water. Without a good story—whether fiction or non-fiction—I begin to feel desiccated and parched. It’s just how I roll.

So driving from the Deep South to California two months ago, narrowly missing a twister in Louisiana and deeply missing the West by the time the sad oil rigs of Midland, Texas, were in the rearview mirror, I began to wish that I’d made my magazine subscription change of address a lot sooner, particularly the New Yorker. Despite the magazine’s impeccably intelligent staff of writers and editors, their subscription department (operated by Condé Nast) gets confused with all my moving. A change of address takes weeks, occasionally months, leaving me frustrated and ornery.

Protesters didn’t exactly win over hearts and minds when they shut off Westside streets last week. When protesting UC Santa Cruz students cut off necessary access to campus, when they break car windows, when they intrude on others’ lives, they actually work against their goal.

Protests are a time-honored tradition, certainly an exercise in free speech. And since the ’60s, protesting has become the tool of activists everywhere – even by those tea party folks on the right.

But are protests effective?

Nobody knew where her red hair came from. Her father believed there had been a red-headed uncle on some distant limb of the family tree, possibly on the McAfee side. But her abundant red hair was just one of the things that made Barbara Anne Bader so special.

Times were tough in the Midwest  during Depression '30s, when Barbara was growing up. But she had an unquenchable zest for fun. She loved to read and draw, and listen to swing bands on the radio. She adored the movies. And she was nuts about the ocean, as only someone born and raised in the flatlands of Nebraska can be. At 21, she moved to California with her kid sister, Jeannie, where she met and soon married Art Jensen, a sailor who shared her love for the sea.

“Let’s say what we mean; mean what we say and let’s get it done.” —Gubernatorial Candidate Meg Whitman

We the electorate have been attacked by Silicon Valley business-speak. The above quote has been tacked on to former eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s many television commercials as she gears up for a run for governor.

I feel like hiding. Both the business world and the political world have been overtaken by soundbites and messaging.

It used to be in the business world that the damage stopped with vacuous but inoffensive mission statements like “We (fill in the organization) are the leading providers of (fill in the product) as we provide our customers with the best products and services on the market.”

What was good about mission statements is that they went into the drawer and nobody ever saw them again, except for maybe on the bulletin board where you can also find the phone number for OSHA.

For the past year I’ve watched my grandmother succumb to dementia.  In truth she has full-blown Alzheimer's disease, but there’s no doubt in my mind she’d prefer the term dementia if she indeed knew what was eating her brain from the inside. She’s proper, after all, hailing from a generation that says “intestinal fortitude” instead of “guts.” Pushing well into 90 years on this good earth, my grandmother is ox-like from the neck down. Her brain, however, has lost all of its capacity to remember what happened five seconds ago.

Though it sounds cruel, I’m trying my best to forget how she is now, trying to forget how last Christmas, she asked me, “is your mummy still alive?” while my mother and I sat on either side of her. Thus, I’ve found I prefer to pull up the more pearly memories.

Most people are satisfied with their contributions to their community, but there may be a bigger reason those that volunteer do so with such fervor. Studies indicate people that volunteer in their communities experience longer lives, better relationships with their families and a stronger sense of social connection. Veritable nutrition ingestion for the soul.

The human soul (to quote C.S. Lewis “You don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body”) cannot be disputed; it’s only what happens in death that becomes discussion. Nonetheless, people require balance between body and soul in order to sustain and live happy lives. The human soul craves connections with other souls. Interacting and supporting another human is nourishment for the soul.