Few things in nature quite touch me like an autumn sky. It’s why I’m including a grainy shot from my cell phone camera, snapped while leaving work tonight. Autumn sunsets make me long for those past falls in Upstate New York. The sun sets early and the temperature plummets and by late September the leaves have reached fever pitch and by early October there are frosts and people walking around in bubble coats after dark. And the air you take into your nose and lungs seems more pure. The air is still as the insect chorus of summer and spring is mute for months ahead.

The days are free of high dew points but often still warm and in a part of the world known for cloudy skies there is suddenly plenty of sunshine. On weekends there is football and from my daughter a clamor about the onrushing winter holidays. It’s escapism and as I grow older I find what’s left of my mind drifting to those serene moments because I fear the unknown and the mismanagement of my country, which makes me fear for my daughter’s future and her future memories.

Many of you know I’ve been in a running battle the last several days with some big media in Washington and Baltimore. The minor leaguer from across the bay is using every last nugget of logic to bring an honest accounting of last weekend’s rally at the Capitol. There is great resistance, arrogance and nastiness from large American media. A college professor and columnist at The Baltimore Sun put down the estimates of my friends. My friends are engineers, pharmaceutical salesmen and retired military officers. Another fellow at The Washington Post acknowledges I’ve got some great points but newsroom inertia isn’t easy to budge. Surprisingly, I’ve been relatively diplomatic through all of this, which as members of my daily audience attest is rare. Imagine a ship’s captain ignoring the pleas of passengers who’ve noticed a hole in the hull. This is the state of newspapers in our country. “Don’t tell me how to foul my business”, they say. “I can reach the bottom on my own”.

It isn’t just papers. The redhead was here last night for some computer work and she was listening to the TV while I was watching Olbermann and Maddow. There were nearly as many Americans watching those shows as the estimated rally figures they offered. I switched to another channel and watched a show about archeologists discovering Mt. Sinai. I needed some hope.

You wouldn’t know it if you get your news from mainstream U.S. media, but when asked, the folks at the Washington Metro answered an additional one quarter of a million people bought train tickets last Saturday when compared to corresponding Saturdays. This doesn’t even approach the numbers of folks arriving by bus, plane and their own cars and trucks. As it happens, the Ombudsman at the Post hints no one at the paper bothered to ask about ticket sales.

Do you remember the story of Moses? When he came down from the mountain, what passed for the media of his day was leading the people astray. Moses had an answer that day for 3,000 members of the media and he preserved a people and a just culture.

This week I’ve been reading about the lack of civility in our culture witnessed by Kanye West, tennis players and, as the media would have it, Joe Wilson. Our institutions are crumbling and no longer trusted. Pew surveyed the public and it finds an all-time record low have any confidence in journalists.

Archeologists insist this is usually the point where cultures collapse and there are a handful of options. In Rome the military and a series of strongmen seized power and the moral rot continued for centuries and with terrible consequences for common people. In the desert southwest of what later became the United States of America the people offered their little children for blood sacrifice.

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