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When Bill Clinton was president, he was evil incarnate to Republicans. When George W. Bush was president, he was evil incarnate to Democrats. Now that Barack Obama is president, he has become evil incarnate to Republicans. Are you seeing a pattern here?

We have an irrational natural tendency to personalize our politics. The people who disagree with us aren’t just wrong. They’re evil. And the problem with them isn’t just the ideas they represent. It’s the people themselves. Yes, we tend to make everything about the people, so we ignore the ideas that gave us those people.

The same system that produced Clinton as president also produced Bush and Obama as president. Ultimately, the men who’ve been elected president are pawns of one basic idea — the idea that if we get “the right man for the job” and give him power over us, everything will be just fine. That’s delusional. The problem isn’t the individuals. The problem is a system that’s based on a false premise.

Getting rid of Obama as president isn’t going to fix the things that conservatives are so worried about. Hating him might help them release some anger in the meantime, but it’s useless in solving the problem. The same was true of all of the irrational insults that were hurled by the progressive left at Bush when he was bumbling through his two terms. I oppose what each man stands for, but I know the underlying system is to blame. It’s only by changing the system that we can ever produce different results.

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You’ve probably seen this picture or seen video of the same scene. Campus police at the University of California at Davis blasted pepper spray at peaceful student protesters Friday. Many people are outraged. Many are calling for the firing of the officers. I’d like to step back and take a broader perspective with three points.

First, this incident proves again that photography matters. In many places, police arrest people for taking pictures of them doing their jobs. In some places, it’s even specifically against the law. The attempts of police, politicians and prosecutors in some places to stop photography of them are wrong, whether it’s through arrests or intimidation.

If the pictures and video from the UC-Davis incident didn’t exist, this would be a non-story. We wouldn’t be talking about the issue. It would be almost as though it didn’t happen. This is why it’s important to strongly press the case that photography is not a crime. (You’ll find plenty of stories at that site of police and other public officials attempting to stop photography that they don’t like.)

Second, these sorts of incidents — and far worse — go on almost every day, but we don’t know about them because there is such a strong “support the police” culture in this country. The people who are experiencing oppression, threats and intimidation from police are mostly those who are powerless to do anything about it. They tend to be poor, black, brown or undereducated. They tend to be people who either don’t know their rights or know they won’t be believed if they complain.

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A couple of nights ago, I ran into some older neighbors of mine, William and Anna, at Target. We talked for five minutes or so, and William seemed perfectly healthy. Saturday, I watched a very different William as paramedics worked on his body as he lay in the grass — trying to keep him from dying.

I don’t know yet what happened to William. A paramedic told another neighbor that they thought he was dead, but that they’d been able to get a pulse back. I look this picture from my yard as they worked on him at the other end of the street. He was taken to a nearby hospital and that’s all I know so far.

I’d already been thinking earlier in the day about the uncertainty of life. There was a traffic accident in Birmingham Friday morning on one of the major arteries into downtown in which two women were killed. A company truck of some kind swerved from the other side of the road and hit their SUV head-on. Other vehicles were also hit, but the two primary ones ended up in flames.

A 55-year-old woman was driving her 74-year-old mother to work and then heading on to work herself. The younger woman’s husband was at home drinking his morning coffee and watched coverage of the accident (and resulting traffic snarl) on television before heading to his job at the Birmingham Museum of Art. His wife’s boss soon called to ask about her and he started trying to reach her. Then a childhood friend who’s a police officer called and told him he needed to come home — because his wife was dead.

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