The world is very complicated. There are bad things happening all the time. But there are good things happening all the time, too. Sometimes bad things come disguised as good things. Sometimes good things look like bad things. It’s tempting to see only the things you want to see, or only the things you expect to see, and thus to deceive yourself.

The New York Times periodically reviews progress in Iraq by looking at the numbers on the ground. The results, like reality, may seem contradictory, giving cause for hope, and cause for hopelessness. Here is the latest update on The State of Iraq. The chart pops up in a separate window, and covers a number of metrics from May 2003 to May 2006. The economy seems to be growing. So is violence, particularly against civilians. As the authors note:

it is increasingly hard to describe Iraq as a glass half-full.

No wonder some of us prefer virtual reality to actual reality.

Rev. Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics, tells how to recognize members of Congress among the many people on Capitol Hill: they’re the ones holding a wet finger in the air, testing which way the wind is blowing.

The great practitioners of real social change, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, understood something very important. They knew that you don’t change a society by merely replacing one wet-fingered politician with another. You change a society by changing the wind.

Wallis says that shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, King went to the White House to urge President Lyndon Johnson to take the next step, a voting rights act that was essential for real change. Johnson told King he had used up all his political capital to pass the Civil Rights Act, and it would be years before a voting rights law could be passed.

King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began organizing — in a sleeply little town nobody had ever heard of, called Selma, Alabama.

On one fateful day, King and the SCLC leaders marched right across the Edmond Pettis Bridge, alongside the people of Selma, to face the notorious Sherriff Jim Clark and his virtual army of angry white police. On what would be called Bloody Sunday, a young man (and now congressman from Atlanta) named John Lewis was beaten almost to death, and many others were injured or jailed.

Two weeks later, in response to that brutal event, hundreds of clergy from all across the nation and from every denomination came to Selma and joined in the Selma to Montgomery march….

The whole nation was watching. The eyes of America were focused on Selma, as they had been on Birmingham before the civil rights law was passed. And after the historic Selma to Montgomery march for freedom, it took only five months, not five or ten years, to pass a new voting rights act: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King had changed the wind.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes about a moment of clarity in Washington:

Once in a while the fog machine that’s kept on “high” around here to obscure everyone’s real intentions breaks down. There’s always a mad rush to crank it up again, but for the briefest moment we can see our elected representatives for what they really are, not what they pretend to be. Wednesday we had one of those rare high-definition moments, when the House Republican caucus defied its leaders and refused to back renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

That tells you about all you need to know, doesn’t it?

…

The renewal probably could have won easy approval on the House floor, since Democrats would have voted for it, but Hastert’s policy is to not bring out any bill that lacks majority support from Republicans, so he had no choice but to yank it.

So much for the erstwhile “party of Lincoln.”

Sometimes you may need to change the wind. But there are other times when all that’s needed is to throw the bums out. This, clearly, is one of those times.