The Call Of The Highway (from A Cell Phone) Is Hard To Resist

It was a lawless stretch of road, houses few and far between. I considered the hazard of some old man in a pickup truck pulling onto the road and our two lives merging but drove fast anyway, and when I got to Isle, I resumed being a nice Christian boy with good manners.

There is a little legislator inside me that wants to crack down on speeders and cell phone users, and there is also a teenager looking for open highway. Not so unusual. We want contradictory things. A person can love Columbus Avenue and also the Chief Joseph Highway over the Beartooth Pass down into Cody, Wyo. It's a big country. A person can love opera and leave the Met walking on air, and yet k.d. lang singing "Crying" is opera too, and a kid with a beat-up guitar who gets hold of "Key to the Highway" can tear at your heart like nobody's business.

So we should tread lightly, be smart, listen to the opposition. They are speaking to our own contradictions. The censors have their day, and then we move on. All that noise that Judge Sotomayor listened to so patiently about the danger of empathy - respect it for what it is, a gentle pushback, and then move her into her new chambers. And then take up health insurance. We have an expensive, inefficient, treacherous, Kafkaesque system that is a drag on business and preys on the vulnerable, but something in us is leery of reform, the opposition clusters like a flock of ravens on the highway shouting "No," and we should slow down a little, and then they will fly up in a cloud and we'll go on.

Garrison Keillor's column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is