So, is this what a democracy is all about?

Boston was the hub of the political world this week, as some 35,000 visitors flocked here for the Democratic National Convention. The city has been turned on its ear in expectation of the events, with many local people planning their vacations expecting inconveniences would cause quite a bother for the ordinary routine. But despite ominous warnings of city gridlock, life went on quite well all week. While all the suckers fled the city, Boston was left half-empty for the rest of us to enjoy.

Beyond the fact that the nominees, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards, were certain to end the week as their party's candidates, there was much intra-Democratic party work to be done, as the officials traditionally use this mid-summer week every four years to rally the party regulars around a common message.

Despite the media bellyaching about the "unnecessary" expense of staging this quadrennial event, political gatherings are a time-honored part of America, with roots going back to the nation's founding days of the Constitutional Congress in Philadelphia.

Truth be told, it really was a great honor that a political party chose Boston, for the first time, to host such an event. Boston is the birthplace of liberty, the place where the country first took form. This week's gathering is truly an historic event for this city, and after tonight's penultimate session, the city can go back and return to normal. It was just four days out of the life of our city, a time when so many people visited, many for the very first time, and saw for themselves just what kind of a gem of a city we live in.

It is sad to observe just how little attention was paid by the general public to just what went on at the convention. The three national TV networks offered only partial coverage; Monday night, the big three, NBC, CBS and ABC broadcast for just one hour, and Tuesday's session was ignored altogether. In fact, it was a good, hard business decision by the network executives - only 12 million households bothered to tune in on Monday night to the network coverage. For political junkies, full gavel-to-gavel coverage was provided by C-Span, and the cable news stations, notably MSNBC, CNN and Fox News interspersed partial coverage of the speeches with talking and bobbing heads telling us what to think.

Most bothersome of all were the right-wing radio talk show hosts, whose main goal seems to be to prevent Americans from hearing for themselves what the politicos have to say, instead serving up a steady stream of caustic cynicsm and, at times, outright lies. It is pathetic that so much of the media has morphed into mindless non-stop talkers peddling their own obtuse and hateful points of view.

Too often, they create distorted caricatures of the pols and their positions, coloring their commentary with distortion, and preventing any full exchange of information and debates over political philosophies. Remember the words of Richard Nixon's erstwhile vice president, about the "nattering nabobs of negativism." Sure Mr. Agnew was skewering what he saw then as a liberal bias in the press; it seems now, three decades and more later, the pendulum has swung, and his phrase aptly applies to the right wing.

In this country of ours, so threatened by issues of terrorism, war without a clear end, struggling middle class workers and health care unaffordable for too many, it is shameful that 50 percent of adult Americans routinely turn away from public policy debates, and turn off from the political process. So many of them won't even to bother to vote come November 2.

Is that what our democracy has become: a place to grouse, to complain, to ignore the things that are important? Do we really expect the rest of the world to admire us when we, a people with so much, act with such insolence? - Ed Forry