Obama (along with the team that he is building) is for sure a huge, (HUGE!!!) improvement on GW Bush and his Gang of War Criminals.

However, Joan Walsh's thoughts and suggestions do not adequately represent the whole picture.

To ensure Obama would properly fulfill his promise (potential) and his explicit and implicit promises to US citizens (and to the world outside the US), it is exactly those US citizens (and others around the world yjsy believe in the potential of democracy) who have to take the lead and become a whole lot more effective as citizens of potential democracies (than they had been during the past eight miserable years of Bush and Gang), War Criminals. I for one would have felt a lot better about Obama if he had - apart from opposing the war on Iraq (actually war against Saddam) - also demanded proper accountability for the actions of the GW Bush administration. (But maybe that was simply not possible - and I as an Indian citizens would not be able to understand clearly what was/is possible for Obama to promise and do).

What thinking US citizens need to do is to take their responsibilities of being citizens of the world's superpower seriously and think, discuss and do appropriately.

Thus far, I've seen only small understanding of this central fact of democratic power and how it is to be gathered and applied from commentators. Some citizens often do have the right ideas (some very good ideas indeed), but generally they lack practical tools that can enable that proper application of this potential power that is actually theirs in any state that is working towards becoming a true democracy.

Salon has provided its very useful forums (like this one) that do enable citizens to discuss issues quite freely. However, this is only a beginning - there are still no effective practical means available that could enable people to jointly identify a societal Mission; articulate the things that need to be done on the ground from day to day to accomplish the Mission; ensure those things are done effectively.

To enable people to articulate clearly the things that need to be done from day to day, some enhancements are required in the way we think and debate: primarily we shall need to extend the language we use to think about and discuss issues - currently we are using 'pure prose'; what is needed is something I call 'prose + structural graphics' (p+sg).

This p+sg is a very minor extension to the prose we are already familiar with - the 'structural graphics' enabling us to explicitly discuss, with considerable clarity, the relationships that are left largely ambiguous in conventional prose. The relationship we are discussing are those inherent (or desired by us) between the factors in the complex systems we are dealing with, the complex systems we wish to create.

John N. Warfield has devised powerful (but extremely simple to understand) tools that can help reveal the complex inter-relationships of factors in systems. In particular, there are practical tools that enable people to:

-- articulate the 'elements' of a system (the factors in the system) and clarify them as needed;

-- model the relationships between those elements vis-a-vis the overarching purposes of the systems under consideration (create p+sg pictures showing the structural relationships between the the factors in the system).

Based on Warfield's seminal contributions to systems science (and systems design) there has developed a uniquely powerful, generic aid to problem solving and decision making that enables anyone, at almost any level (only an ability to read and write required), to identify a Mission in the real world and to develop, from available ideas, an Action Plan to accomplish the Mission. The whole process is (continuingly) iterative - and thus initial wrong ideas and thoughts are naturally weeded out over time.

It takes at most just a couple of hours to understand how this p+sg provides a huge enhancement of our understanding of how complex systems behave; and only a few more hours to understand how to use p+sg effectively to define a Mission and to create an initial Action Plan of things to do today, tomorrow and so forth to accomplish the Mission - that initial Action Plan will take only a few hours to create. Needless to say, it takes a whole lot more work and thought to ensure that all elements in the Action Plan are implemented effectively!

I do wish Salon readers and editors would take the small trouble that would be needed to investigate my claims further.

-- GSC