Imagine my surprise to find I have something in common with Charlton Heston.

I've been amazed in recent days at how many ways there are to lead people, represent people, and legislate people as if there were no people.  We can talk about markets, free trade, unions, jobs, deficits and budgets as if they were tidy, sterile, even theoretical things, removed and above the grubby, messy world of people and their day to day lives.  It's handy to use such clean comfortable language when discussing things like bumping people out of the middle class and into the ranks of the working poor.  Or refusing to sit at the negotiating table with them to work things out.

The problem with our neat and tidy language and our oblique discussions about our nation's attractiveness to business or our state's real-or-imagined budget crisis is that nations and states don't exist in a theoretical ether.  Behind every market, union, job, deficit, and budget is PEOPLE.  Real people.  More to the point, OUR people.  Governors and congresspeople are not elected to serve budgets.  They are not elected to serve their parties.  The are elected to serve the people who have so graciously -- and so temporarily -- given them the power they enjoy.

I may be well served by having my state's budget cut and my nation's deficit cut.  But no one is served if these things take place while robbing people of dignity, a voice, and rights.  No one is served by having their schools gutted and their public servants vilified. 

Remember the last scene in the movie Soylent Green?  Chas Heston announces his shocking discovery that "Soylent Green is people!"  Someone needs to smack a lot of our elected officials upside the head with a reminder that behind all their numbers and stats and million dollar this and trillion dollar that -- there are people!  The numbers represent people: Americans!  And none of them are our enemies!

There is an explosion in the number of Americans who aren't worried that their representatives' econonic theories aren't pure or tidy enough.  They aren't concerned that they may lose a few dollars out of their mutual funds.  They are struggling, fighting, to pay for their housing, their transportation.  They want decent clothes for their kids and food on the table.  They don't want this year's new Audi.  They want to put brakes on their 10-year old Toyota so they can  get to their three jobs!

Compassion, kindness, a little human decency -- these things are free.  And they're overdue.