I can’t stand to look at images of oil-smothered birds and beaches soiled by black blobs. They make me nauseous, as does the media’s recent focus on whether the President is emoting enough.  I can’t even imagine the pressure building every hour and day on executives of BP, Obama’s team, and the people of the Gulf.  I pray for the unsung BP heroes working round the clock to stop the leak.  Maybe we’ll get some good news this week about an idea that will stop the oil flow before August, when the relief wells are completed.

Meanwhile, what can we do?

Go green, is what occurs to me on a green-gray morning in Cambridge.  Buy bicycles. Walk more. Turn off the air conditioning unless the heat gets crazy.  Turn down the heat.  Till now, I will confess that I have been mainly a talk-the-talk environmentalist.  This mess makes me hard-core.  The BP spill marks the end of my personal complacency, because every single small green act is a way of doing something in the face of excruciating tragedy.  If the images and facts of this calamity are not enough to turn the consciousness of the nation toward sustainable growth, then we are simply doomed.

I don’t claim a rational link to my next intention, but I also plan to start eating more green stuff.  As I approach 60 this summer, I know I need to reboot my eating and exercise.  Most of what I love to eat is not green.  Donuts, cookies, toast with honey, hard salami, Ritz crackers, Jarlsberg cheese, chili, root beer — those are some of my favorite foods, balanced by the occasional virtuous dinner of fish.  I’ve heard you can establish a habit by doing it for 30 days in a row, so I’m going to eat something green every day for the next 30 days.  Bring on the lettuce, broccoli, spinach, and asparagus.  On our next trip to Whole Foods, I’m going to simply buy anything green, including green tea.

I’m going to look for the green in every scene, like the one outside my window this morning.  That’s an oak tree closest to me, and beyond it glow the rich green grass of the park and the muted green of the famous Sycamore trees that line Memorial Drive along the Charles River.  I also notice my green-covered One Laptop Per Child computer, which I use in tandem with the one I gave my grandson.  The text messages I send on my iPhone appear on a green background.  The top index card on my hipster PDA is green. The traffic light in the intersection outside my window just turned green.  It’s time.

Green doesn’t get mad. Green grows toward the sun. Green loves the rain. Dave Brubeck is green, or at least that’s how a Pandora mix based on his music sounds this morning.  My birthday on August 30 will have a green theme–I’m not sure how, but something will occur to me.  Real green has to start somewhere.  Why not today?

The moment came like a mouse poking its nose into a room.  CSPAN’s “Yea” total morphed from 217 to 218, the number required for passage of HR 3962, the “Affordable Health Care for America Act.” I was in the guestroom upstairs, where the heat hadn’t been turned on since we arrived back from Denver.  I’d been watching CSPAN all night on my computer, but as the final vote came I wanted to be somehow closer to history, so I punched in CNN to find two third-string talking heads trivializing the moment.  I wanted David Gergen to pronounce the historic significance, or even Wolfie.  But the moment came, nonetheless.  I am 59 years old. I want to remember this.

I have all 1,990 pages as a .pdf document on my Kindle DX. It took approximately 20 seconds to download it.  Here’s a vision from 40 years from now, when I plan to still be blogging or whatever the equivalent will be in 2049: My 16-year-old great-granddaughter looks at a photo of a guy thumping on a fat stack of white material, complaining about its length — 1,990 pages! “What’s a page, Great-Grampa?”  Well, my child…

I confess that I have not been a big supporter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  I don’t want to examine my bias closely, because I suspect it’s an unsavory amalgam of prejudice against California, a certain sound of voice, and of women who are not stylish and uber-confident, like Condi Rice,  Hillary Clinton, and, of course, Michelle.  But I found it striking how the opponents of health care reform had clearly decided to use demonization of Pelosi as a refrain.  “Pelosi’s Bill,” was the sneering handle applied, as if that’s all you needed to know about it in order to run screaming from the hall. The Wonkette satirizes the Pelosi-as-demon meme with an animated graphic showing her teeth turning into fangs under the headline, “House Votes to Kill Your Grandmother & All Christians, 220-215.” So when the self-congratulatory media appearance came, I was surprised to see a woman in a red dress without horns or a pitchfork.  What struck me more was how convincing members of the House leadership sounded in attributing passage of the bill to the efforts of this sometimes-halting San Francisco grandmother of seven.  If the Affordable Health Care for America Act becomes law, Pelosi’s foes will have given her a leg up in the history books by trying to use a caricature of her to kill it.

I loved the one-minute statements by members of the House, alternating for and against the bill.  It was like a Twitter stream in the variety and the relief of knowing that everyone had to observe the same character limit.  (Luckily there are no Leaders of the House of Twitter granted immunity from 140 characters the way Pelosi and Minority Leader John Boehner are.) It’s one thing to see Rachel Maddow or Rush bloviate for ratings and huge salaries.  It’s quite another to see scores of Americans elected by their neighbors speak from the heart with varying levels of eloquence and effectiveness.  Each one is a story of knocking on doors, building organizations, learning the ropes of Congress, sitting through boring hearings on boring topics that matter in people’s lives.  That they disagree with each so violently makes me sigh with appreciation at this system of government that has, so far, mainly contained irreconcilable differences of opinion on what course the nation should take.  Instead of a gun or explosive device, the sharp sound of a gavel is enough to assure the next speaker his or her chance to be heard.

I am a moderate. Which means I don’t give myself the comfort of believing that everyone opposing this bill is a selfish lunatic. Those who see this turn of the wheel as a dire retreat from individual freedoms speak for me, too, because I also cherish the individual freedoms in this country.  My parents’ formative years coincided with World War II, when the continuation of these freedoms was seriously in doubt.  Maybe that makes them wiser than I am, better able to see threats disguised as progress.  But I have to enter the world of ideas and political engagement where I arrived, coming of age in the 1960s instead of the 1940s.  So I embrace the health care reform bill with hope tainted with apprehension about the deficit, and the swelling of the federal bureaucracy.  The hope part has to do with my confidence that my country always seems to find its way toward justice and individual opportunity — a combination that continues to beckon would-be immigrants from around the world.

I haven’t mentioned the President.  I worked for his election, because I believed he was a moderate, too.  More than that, I hoped the “no drama” part of his nickname would enable him to successfully slog toward his objectives, with the discipline and emotional wisdom he displayed during the long campaign.  I remember the night before the election, when my wife and I gathered with other volunteers in a small room in Denver to listen to Obama’s pep talk to thousands of campaign workers via a telephone hookup. The polling showed a probable win, but the candidate urged us to ignore it.  “Leave it all on the field,” he said from a plane somewhere between final campaign stops. I’m sure he’s saying the same thing now.

As I was monitoring Tweets during President Obama’s town hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, today I was very happy to see that my friend Jim Long, an ace NBC cameraman and new media visionary, was covering the event.  “@LenEdgerly is IN THE HOUSE here in Portsmouth!!! (I’m behind the cuts riser)” came across my Tweetie iPhone app, and afterward in the hallway of Portsmouth High School we spotted each other in meatspace.  Jim was about to film NBC’s White House correspondent, Chuck Todd, whom I’ve always admired, so my wife and I had a chance to meet Chuck.  I hoped Mr. Todd didn’t realize that I had been the cheeky guy in line to enter the school who had yelled, “Hey, Chuck Todd!” as he was climbing a hill to interview demonstrators, prompting him to turn around with a startled wave to no one in particular.

Jim asked if Darlene and I could follow him and Chuck past a woman guarding another hallway, but she denied the request. We waited for him in the main hallway and had a brief reunion afterward.  As @newmediajim on Twitter, Jim has 30,000-plus followers who love his Tweets from all over the world.  He confided that it was interesting to hang out in central Texas during the last administration, but that he is looking forward to 10 days of POTUS watching on Martha’s Vinyard soon.

I first met Jim in person two years ago when I did a two-part video portrait of him for my Video Pod Chronicles.  He was covering President Bush during a tete-a-tete with burgers at Kennebunkport with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.  I was terrifically impressed at how Jim was straddling the worlds of new and old media, and I still am.  “He’s such a nice guy,” my wife said on the bus afterward.  What she’d noticed is a quality which makes Jim Long so successful as a big time news cameraman. He meets every person and event with boyish but smart enthusiasm, in addition to deep professional talent and experience in the medium of video.  We had an amazing time at the town hall.  Our impromptu meetup with @newmediajim was the perfect punctuation mark for a great day.

Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist‘s Washington bureau chief and, for the past 13 years, author of the paper’s “Lexington” column, suitably chose July 4th for a farewell column titled “Two Cheers for America.” It’s a great read, one of my first pleasures in having a new subscription to The Economist on my Kindle.

Wooldridge echoes Alex de Tocqueville’s seminal portrait of the United States in 1831, noting that the Frenchman’s initial enthusiasm for the U.S. darkened after 1840, according to a new collection of his writing, Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings.  Wooldridge writes,

It is presumptuous to mention oneself alongside the author of the greatest book written about America. But during the 13 years that the author of this column has spent in the United States, he too has found his initial exuberance clouded by darker thoughts. When he arrived in 1996, America was lord of all it surveyed, the world’s only remaining superpower, convinced of its supreme benevolence, and the engine of a productivity miracle that left Europeans in awe. Social pathologies such as violent crime were being brought under control; almost half of households owned shares. The place had an air of what Mark Twain once called “the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces”.

Today, this serene confidence has long gone. Americans are more pessimistic than the Indians or Chinese, worried that their children will not enjoy the opportunities that they have taken for granted. Xenophobia is on the rise, as is nostalgia for a time of stable families and solid values. California, the state that has always reached the future first, is preparing to pay its bills with IOUs.

The departing columnist continues with what I found to be an even-handed account of this nation’s recent troubles, but what I like about The Economist is a certain detachment and distance which makes even its forcefully stated opinions seem like reasonable accounts, not ideological rants.  It’s not shy in criticizing Obama.  “Whether Mr. Obama can deliver on his promises is open to doubt:” Wooldridge writes, “his inspiring rhetoric is marred by a willingness to compromise with his party’s free-spending establishment in Congress.”   As opposed to emotional/ideological attacks on Obama from the right and the left, The Economist‘s brand of analysis fits my stubbornly moderate view of the world.

And by the end of Wooldridge’s farewell, he widens the perspective beyond any one administration, to find the following solid reason for optimism regarding the American experiment:

That is the country’s taste for entrepreneurial capitalism, a taste that arrived with the first settlers and is becoming an ever greater resource, as the global economy is shaken by wave upon wave of disruptive technologies. America still has a genius for incubating entrepreneurs and giving those entrepreneurs the wherewithal to turn bright ideas into global behemoths. America’s biggest company, Wal-Mart, was founded only in 1962; its sexiest, Google, was conceived in a Californian dorm room at about the time that your columnist arrived on these shores. Even as de Tocqueville despaired about the future of his half-adopted country in the 1840s and 1850s, the likes of Carnegie and Rockefeller were about to unleash the greatest productivity miracle the world has seen. That is the America that still promises much.

Well said, old chap!  And I for one would not consider it presumptuous if you turned this sane farewell into an introduction for your own contribution to the genre that de Tocqueville initiated nearly 80 years ago.