“I just can’t get my head around it.”

Dave was talking about the trillion dollar deficit.

He blames Obama.

Well, he wasn’t happy with Bush, either.

He was against invading Iraq. Yes, he was even against invading Afghanistan, although – he grants – the Taliban had been harboring Islamic terrorists. He knows that was all Bush’s doing.

For the moment, though, Dave is chiefly upset with Obama and all the money that’s been spent bailing out Wall Street and the auto industry.

In Dave’s defense, I should point out that he spent his career as a social worker. He remains a great champion of kids and has no patience with those who want to take kids who commit crimes, lock ‘em up and throw away the key. He’s not indifferent to people who are suffering in this recession.

Besides, he’s an old friend from high school. We share the same birthday.

But his anger over the deficit echoes the Tea Party movement. I guess if there’s one issue that unites folk who identify with that group it’s the deficit spending. To be sure, they don’t like the health care reform law, either.

I recall that for most of the years I wrote editorials for The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne – nearly 30 – the federal government ran a deficit. During the Johnson years, the deficit financed the Great Society programs and the Vietnam War. Nixon ran up deficits. So did Ford. And Carter. Yes, Reagan and Bush I. It wasn’t until Clinton that the feds gave us a surplus. The second Bush quickly spent that, thanks in part to large tax cuts for higher income citizens.

Everybody hates deficit spending.

How often do you hear these days, “Why if I ran my household the way the president – you name him – runs the federal government, I’d be in the poorhouse”?

The truth is that most Americans, at one time or another, do run up deficits. Granted, not on the scale of the federal government. Car payments, credit card interest and mortgages – these aren’t tiddly-winks. Those represent deficit spending.

We go into debt to buy what we think we need and, under the normal rules of the game, we can show our creditors that we’ll be able to pay off the debt.

In the deepest recession since the Great Depression, the government would be incredibly irresponsible not to run up the deficit. Indeed, the huge amount of spending that Dave – and I suppose most of us – can’t get our heads around has helped prevent an even deeper recession. In fact, we seem to be emerging from the economic crisis. In some parts of the country, unemployment seems to be inching back down. Other signs show improvement.

According to the Treasure Department, the deficit in June 2010 dropped to $68.4 billion. That’s down from $94.3 billion last June.

That’s impressive. But it’s pretty simple math.

As more people go back to work, they start paying taxes again. So the government collects more money and the deficit falls. Obviously, you want to see those big numbers whittled much further. That’s the challenge once we’re really out of the recession. For now, there’s plenty to debate about how federal dollars should be spent to prop up the economy. But the reality is, deficit spending probably has been our country’s salvation.

An old friend died the other day.

Bill Taylor wasn’t just anybody either.  Not to me.  Not to the country.

Indeed, his obit ran in The New York Times and other major newspapers.

They told how he was a major civil rights attorney, starting his career with Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Attorneys there had this brilliant young lawyer write the legal brief in the Little Rock desegregation case.

He was the lead attorney in a number of cases, including St. Louis.  And in Cincinnati.

“I wish we could clone him,” Federal District Judge Walter Rice in that case told me.

I got to know Bill when I was writing editorials that called for Fort Wayne Community Schools to fully desegregate its kids.  That was in the 1970s and 1980s.  The district ran half dozen schools that we nearly all black in our inner city.   Bill, mostly by telephone, tutored me in the fine points of desegregation law, the history of major court decisions and the legal basis of any suit we could file against the district here.

I got to know Bill best at education conferences and, when my wife Toni was a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 1992, over a number of lunches.

I helped enlist Bill to lead the effort to get the Fort Wayne district to do what I strongly felt was its legal and moral responsibility.   With the financial support of Lincoln National Corp.’s CEO, Ian Rolland, Bill got involved.  First, he tried negotiations with school attorneys.  That produced only frustration.  Then, in 1986, he filed the lawsuit in federal court.   It wasn’t until 1989, however, that district officials consented to an out-of-court settlement.

The result was to racially balance all Fort Wayne schools, mostly by creating a number of magnet schools.

That watershed event in the community’s history now seems so long ago.  You no longer see letters to the editor decrying the integration of the schools.  Nobody even proposes filing a new lawsuit to overturn the district’s method of assigning students.  A recent Supreme Court ruling would appear to place that method in legal jeopardy.

Meantime, in his legal work, and lobbying in Congress,  Bill went on to other things.  That included drafting the No Child Left Behind Law for Sen. Ted Kennedy.  To Bill’s dismay, President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress failed to adequately fund the law.   Nevertheless, Bill always felt that much-maligned law helped established standards to the benefit of poor and minority kids.  He wrote a memoir, “The Passion of My Times.”

Since I learned of Bill’s death last week, I’ve often thought how far from realizing the equality that civil rights champions like him dreamed of.  Lots of our fellow citizens object to the idea of having a black president. Others have no interest in making it possible for undocumented immigrants to become citizens.

Maybe these folks don’t hate America.  But it’s the America of the 1950s they think they love.   The country we’ve become, with much expanded rights and opportunities for those who may not be like us,  that’s the America they hate.

To the end, though, I know that Bill Taylor never gave up on his dream of a greater America, a country of justice for all.   He sure did his part.  Of course, I’ll miss him.

An old friend died the other day.

Bill Taylor wasn’t just anybody either.  Not to me.  Not to the country.

Indeed, his obit ran in The New York Times and other major newspapers.

They told how he was a major civil rights attorney, starting his career with Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Attorneys there had this brilliant young lawyer write the legal brief in the Little Rock desegregation case.

He was the lead attorney in a number of cases, including St. Louis.  And in Cincinnati.

“I wish we could clone him,” Federal District Judge Walter Rice in that case told me.

I got to know Bill when I was writing editorials that called for Fort Wayne Community Schools to fully desegregate its kids.  That was in the 1970s and 1980s.  The district ran half dozen schools that we nearly all black in our inner city.   Bill, mostly by telephone, tutored me in the fine points of desegregation law, the history of major court decisions and the legal basis of any suit we could file against the district here.

I got to know Bill best at education conferences and, when my wife Toni was a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 1992, over a number of lunches.

I helped enlist Bill to lead the effort to get the Fort Wayne district to do what I strongly felt was its legal and moral responsibility.   With the financial support of Lincoln National Corp.’s CEO, Ian Rolland, Bill got involved.  First, he tried negotiations with school attorneys.  That produced only frustration.  Then, in 1986, he filed the lawsuit in federal court.   It wasn’t until 1989, however, that district officials consented to an out-of-court settlement.

The result was to racially balance all Fort Wayne schools, mostly by creating a number of magnet schools.

That watershed event in the community’s history now seems so long ago.  You no longer see letters to the editor decrying the integration of the schools.  Nobody even proposes filing a new lawsuit to overturn the district’s method of assigning students.  A recent Supreme Court ruling would appear to place that method in legal jeopardy.

Meantime, in his legal work, and lobbying in Congress,  Bill went on to other things.  That included drafting the No Child Left Behind Law for Sen. Ted Kennedy.  To Bill’s dismay, President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress failed to adequately fund the law.   Nevertheless, Bill always felt that much-maligned law helped established standards to the benefit of poor and minority kids.  He wrote a memoir, “The Passion of My Times.”

Since I learned of Bill’s death last week, I’ve often thought how far from realizing the equality that civil rights champions like him dreamed of.  Lots of our fellow citizens object to the idea of having a black president. Others have no interest in making it possible for undocumented immigrants to become citizens.

Maybe these folks don’t hate America.  But it’s the America of the 1950s they think they love.   The country we’ve become, with much expanded rights and opportunities for those who may not be like us,  that’s the America they hate.

To the end, though, I know that Bill Taylor never gave up on his dream of a greater America, a country of justice for all.   He sure did his part.  Of course, I’ll miss him.