I’m taking on some professional obligations that will make it hard to keep doing this the way I'd want to, so this is probably my last column for a while (also, maybe not).

As an idealistic teenage fan of "The West Wing," one of my few professional dreams was to be an opinion columnist at a newspaper, where my soaring and incisive rhetorical flourishes would shift the discourse around the important issues of the day. I don't know whether I succeeded by that measure, but a few readers have been kind enough to say I’ve at least been a fun hang.

As I step away from this platform, I find myself thinking less about the issues and more about how we talk about them.

I believe that our civic future is, at some level, a choice that can be understood through two competing flight metaphors.

We’re all familiar with United Airlines Flight 93: the 9/11 jet on which passengers realized the hijackers intended to crash the plane into a building in Washington, DC, charged the cockpit and brought the plane down. They were heroes and should forever be remembered as such.

Unfortunately, in almost direct contrast to the heroic nature of those passengers, the Flight 93 metaphor has become one of the more toxic concepts of our time: the idea that if the alternative is losing to our perceived enemies, it’s better to bring the whole plane down.

That ethos has hardened over........

© USA TODAY