From Thomas Paine's Common Sense - one of the prime documents of the revolution. I need to read and study this...but even just reading the opening of the pamphlet amazed me. Let me share:
"Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. the one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher."
I think that says it quite well. We have confounded society with government on a truly stunning scale. Modern America is using government as a means of procuring wants, ignoring the fact that government, by its very nature, is a punisher. In using it to procure the wants of some, then, it is punishing others. That is the nature of government, and until (or unless) we learn to distinguish what Paine said in his first paragraph, the punishment will continue.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Loose Leaf
I don't fit in. I've known that for a very, very long time. Sometimes it has been a curse, sometimes a blessing, but it's always been a truth. Personally and politically, I'm a bit the odd one. But I've always been a dreamer. My early education focused on the founding of America through a patriotic and passionate lens, and that vision of the land of the free and the home of the brave melded itself inseparably with my own hopes and ideals.
Unfortunately, that proud vision of the land of our fathers became tattered as I grew up. It wasn't the political decisions of any man or woman. It wasn't some terrible war or traumatic truth. It was the toll of time and pragmatism. The bold lines of the portraits of framers and fathers were smudged; the edges of the constitution were tattered. There were no Jeffersons, Washingtons or Adams to be found. Politics could no longer be said to be about bringing ideals into reality and crafting the identity of a new and different people. It was a place of corruption, a place cut off from the practical concerns of the people it represented and the ideological ideas it should be aspiring to. It was discouraging, and the more I looked at it, the more disheartening it grew. So, like so many Americans, I turned away.
The ugliness of government continued to intrude, however. Government's power became increasingly invasive, and as I strove to succeed – to make my own small American Dream coalesce into reality - I found myself more and more frequently encountering both the government's influence and the opinions of those I worked with regarding the government and its courses of action. They felt helpless, apathetic, disconnected. They complained. I complained. But we accepted, cowed by the massive leviathan of federal authority.
Then, on the radio, I heard about the Tea Party movement. I was enchanted. Admittedly, I heard no statement of principles, no particular credo, but I wasn't looking for one. The name was enough. Those two words, "tea party" invoked all of the dramatic images and exciting stories of fourth grade history. It was patriotic; it was glowing with the simple, heroic idealism of historical narrative. And, more than that, it promised something I had long ago given up on: heroic involvement and adventure in shaping the course of the mighty dream called America.
Perhaps logically, that image called to others as well. For all of the much vaunted failures of the educational system, it seems that the Boston Tea Party has enough dramatic potential to fire the imaginations of new generations. I believe that a great measure of that call came from the same source that sparked my imagination – it was a promise of involvement, a promise of heroism and adventure, a genuine opportunity to matter.
In an increasingly oligarchic almost exclusively two party system, the idea of individual Americans having the opportunity to be heroes, to emulate the often canonized, rarely examined "founding fathers" is almost irresistible. Weeks ago, I heard a radio host allege that modern criticism of America is no different than that of 50 years ago; America has always been self-critical. That may be true, but modern criticism bears a deep difference – it brings with it the bitter aftertaste of apathy. There is a sense that the nation is a decrepit juggernaut bearing its constituents to some inevitable, unknown end.
That sense of doom and apathy breeds desperation. It served as the leverage for the promises of change and the sometimes almost religious fervor that catapulted Barak Obama into office. It provided the fallow ground for the images of a 250 year old act of rebellion to draw people into the tea party movement.
With time and success, however, comes rationality. By modern standards, the Boston Tea Party was an act of vandalism and violence. It was a powerful statement – but it was also, technically, a criminal one. It was an act of a mob, and although it sent a powerful message, it was not the act of great men. Without the ideas and the passionate, sacrificial organization of the generals and delegates, the tea party would have been nothing more than another piece of mob violence.
In any ideal involving large numbers of people, the mob becomes a factor. "We the people" somewhere bleeds into "we the mob majority," and the pull of the lowest common denominator becomes an almost irresistible black hole that sucks in the last rays of dreams and ideals into its gravitational pit. The Greeks put harsh limitations on "democracy" in an attempt to prevent the lowest common denominator from dragging their decisions into mob rule. The Romans devolved from responsible representative government into the appeasement of the mob, and found that the mob cannot be appeased. They pillaged their own cities beside the invading barbarian tribes and then begged for government assistance to mediate the loss.
Without clear headed leadership - leadership that understands the concerns of the people and yet strives to protect individual liberty rather than placate base human greed and selfishness with appeasement and protectionism that dehumanizes those it claims to assist - political systems devolve into mob rule. Perhaps modern America appears more elegant with its iphones and internet outlets, but ideologically, we are still in the coliseum. The crowd chants and stamps its feet; politicians yield to opinion polls and fear bricks through their windows, and the people go mad with the smell of blood.
I started this blog because I need to speak. My imagination is still sparked by the idealized image of those early Americans clad as "natives," throwing tea into Boston harbor to show their hatred of an unresponsive, invasive government. But I believe that such dramatic violence without wise leadership and clearly elucidated principles is dangerous and destructive. The "Tea Party Movement" as it has been labeled has not yet produced any such leadership or any clear philosophy other than anger and an un-clarified identification with the revolutionaries at the birth of the nation.
I want to capture that sense of adventure and the idea of being able to re-birth a government of the people by the people. But I think that part of achieving that ideal is understanding it. This place is called loose leaf because I am unwilling to simply stay inside the bag of any party – tea or otherwise. I advocate passion, but I deplore the thoughtless violence of the mob. Perhaps if we can temper passion with knowledge of the men who crafted this dream called America, we may yet reclaim it and return, from the coliseum to the floor of the senate and the verbal violence of the chambers of Philadelphia rather than the stench of Boston Harbor.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Death of Responsibility
It’s bubbling up again. The questions of health care and the debate over its reform is once again finding its way onto the air waves and into the “top headlines” on my Google homepage. The debate has thundered on for months, each side seemingly believing that volume rather than substance will win support. Yet in all of the voices I’ve heard promising plenty and predicting pogroms, only one has made perfect sense to me.
The person interviewed was, surprisingly enough, a doctor. Questioned about the practicality of the lumbering behemoth of a bill that was, at the time, working its way through the legislature, he gave his interviewer a single, simple answer: nothing will fix the problem as long as demand is so outrageously high. He went on to explain that, in his opinion, much of the difficulty with healthcare, and the reason that American healthcare is proportionately outrageously priced and overloaded is that Americans expect healthcare to take care of every problem they or their family might have, and doctors want to make money, so they meet demand with supply. He also pointed out that doctors feel the need to meet demand because they fear legal repercussions from failing to test everything and provide the medication results promised in a pithy television advertisement.
I remember the doctor’s words because he reached beyond political partisanship to point out a deeper, simpler truth. Part of the problem with healthcare is cultural, not financial. We can legislate the hell out of our system, but until we can change cultural attitudes, costs are not going to drop.
The cultural attitude that costs us so much in medical bills is one that frightens me. It is an attitude of entitlement; a slide of responsibility out of individual hands and into the hands of some, not quite defined beneficent power that has, despite its human origin, risen above human concerns to absolute altruism.
Practically, such an idea sounds ridiculous. Ask just about anyone, regardless of political leanings, whether they trust the government, and you’ll get a hoarse laugh and an incredulous look. Trust the government? Of course not. Yet many of those same people are more than willing to allow the government to assume responsibility for their safety, their medical care, and their job security. That rising gap between practical understanding and government responsibility is chillingly visible to me. Every semester my students tell me that the constitution guarantees them the right to happiness; they justify everything from gay marriage to carrying a gun under that promise. You can chalk that up to the failure of our education system; you can laugh at student ignorance, but in the end, I believe that the mistake is the highest form of Freudian slip. It represents an increasingly prevalent attitude in American society; we have the right to be happy, and someone needs to make it so. Whether that happiness is the result of financial disbursements of money, the guarantee of safety for a small price of privacy, or pills to make us happy and well behaved, more and more people believe that happiness is a right, not a responsibility.
In those three small words, “the pursuit of,” the founding fathers definitively put happiness in the hands of individuals. They guaranteed us the right to chase our dreams, to pursue happiness with all of our substance, but they did not guarantee we would get it. Obtaining happiness is, in the end, up to us. It is our individual responsibility and choice – and in the grander scheme of things, history teaches us that it is often the pursuit, not the obtaining, that makes men great.
Yet that greatness is increasingly lost. Many authors have speculated on the impact of antidepressants on creativity and suggested that many of the great artists in history, had they lived today, would have been medicated out of their misery and, along with it, their creativity. More and more often, our culture focuses on a top heavy structure of responsibility that promises the right to happiness guaranteed by a well organized social system that increasingly combines with science to take the place of religion. Individual greatness and heroism is good, for what it is, but such greatness (particularly when based on actual actions rather than media creation) is damaging, for it makes others more responsible and less happy, wishing for something they may not have. Take, for example, the attempted bombing at Christmas this past year. The bombing was foiled by individuals on the plane, individuals who took responsibility for their lives and that of their fellow passengers. Those women and men acted heroically. Yet I do not know the name of a single one of those people. Instead, modern culture immediately sought a hierarchical response. Rather than focusing on the heroism of the individuals who stopped the bomber, cultural media immediately began contemplating what part of the machinery of airport security had failed and how the government could step in to guarantee safety. It was not enough to honor the idea that individual responsibility saved lives. It was the job of some great benevolent machine to prevent the need for individual heroics because, of course, individuals cannot always be counted upon to be heroic.
On the radio several weeks ago, I heard a commentator discussing an article which examined the overall negativity of American culture. “I don’t see a difference,” he declared, “being critical of the country and its leadership is a healthy part of our culture. We’ve always done that.” Indeed, we have, but as I told my uncaring radio, the sense of helplessness, of loss of ownership, has never been so intense. As we lose individual responsibility as a cultural value, we also lose our sense of cultural empowerment. The idea that the government actually represents the people in any meaningful way is fading, replaced by a sense that there is an inevitable power structure, having very little immediate connection with the people, whose purpose is to enable the individual right to happiness. There is a rising sense of fate, a notion that the leviathan of government is far too massive for individuals to influence, and that notion of accepting the inevitable seems to be rapidly tumbling into nationwide depression and the evolution of a culture of systemic, rather than individual, responsibility.
Ironically, that loss of responsibility finds expression in practical terms as well. We find ourselves in the grip of structural responsibility, in a place not unlike that created by Soviet authority. In his book The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild tours a Russia emerging from the shadow of Stalin, and he notes the general state of collapse of the cities and even the public areas of the apartment buildings. He writes that in stark contrast to the squalid public areas, Russian homes are immaculate; those spaces are theirs. It is their “feeling about public property that was the problem. Until this changes, real democracy in Russia, a democracy that does not just go through the motions of holding elections but is built on people’s confidence that they themselves control the state, and not somebody else, is far off” (187). Sadly enough, the same could be said of modern America. We have lost the confidence that the people control the state. Instead, we feel impotent, coddled in the promise of happiness provided by the state, yet frustrated by the endless ineptitude of a bureaucratic dragon we feel we cannot slay. We are not emerging from the shadow of some tangible regime; we are sliding into the shade of cultural irresponsibility, seeking happiness that we view as a right, yet have no desire to pursue and make our own.
So when the radio begins to tell me about the impact of healthcare reform, I switch to the 80s station. It is not that I don’t care – quite the opposite. It is simply that I do not believe that healthcare, or much of anything else, can be meaningfully reformed until someone has the courage to face up to the cultural illiteracy that lies beneath the partisan dog and pony show. Until Americans realize that they are responsible for their own health and that their time is better spent in pursuit of happiness than pursuit of populism, legislation isn’t going to change a thing. People will continue to demand pills to solve everything and social safeguards to protect them from failure – and from spectacular success. As long as we live in fear of the effort and risk it takes to pursue happiness, we’re never going to catch it, and we’re never going to be mentally or emotionally healthy from the effort of the pursuit – no matter what they legislate.
The person interviewed was, surprisingly enough, a doctor. Questioned about the practicality of the lumbering behemoth of a bill that was, at the time, working its way through the legislature, he gave his interviewer a single, simple answer: nothing will fix the problem as long as demand is so outrageously high. He went on to explain that, in his opinion, much of the difficulty with healthcare, and the reason that American healthcare is proportionately outrageously priced and overloaded is that Americans expect healthcare to take care of every problem they or their family might have, and doctors want to make money, so they meet demand with supply. He also pointed out that doctors feel the need to meet demand because they fear legal repercussions from failing to test everything and provide the medication results promised in a pithy television advertisement.
I remember the doctor’s words because he reached beyond political partisanship to point out a deeper, simpler truth. Part of the problem with healthcare is cultural, not financial. We can legislate the hell out of our system, but until we can change cultural attitudes, costs are not going to drop.
The cultural attitude that costs us so much in medical bills is one that frightens me. It is an attitude of entitlement; a slide of responsibility out of individual hands and into the hands of some, not quite defined beneficent power that has, despite its human origin, risen above human concerns to absolute altruism.
Practically, such an idea sounds ridiculous. Ask just about anyone, regardless of political leanings, whether they trust the government, and you’ll get a hoarse laugh and an incredulous look. Trust the government? Of course not. Yet many of those same people are more than willing to allow the government to assume responsibility for their safety, their medical care, and their job security. That rising gap between practical understanding and government responsibility is chillingly visible to me. Every semester my students tell me that the constitution guarantees them the right to happiness; they justify everything from gay marriage to carrying a gun under that promise. You can chalk that up to the failure of our education system; you can laugh at student ignorance, but in the end, I believe that the mistake is the highest form of Freudian slip. It represents an increasingly prevalent attitude in American society; we have the right to be happy, and someone needs to make it so. Whether that happiness is the result of financial disbursements of money, the guarantee of safety for a small price of privacy, or pills to make us happy and well behaved, more and more people believe that happiness is a right, not a responsibility.
In those three small words, “the pursuit of,” the founding fathers definitively put happiness in the hands of individuals. They guaranteed us the right to chase our dreams, to pursue happiness with all of our substance, but they did not guarantee we would get it. Obtaining happiness is, in the end, up to us. It is our individual responsibility and choice – and in the grander scheme of things, history teaches us that it is often the pursuit, not the obtaining, that makes men great.
Yet that greatness is increasingly lost. Many authors have speculated on the impact of antidepressants on creativity and suggested that many of the great artists in history, had they lived today, would have been medicated out of their misery and, along with it, their creativity. More and more often, our culture focuses on a top heavy structure of responsibility that promises the right to happiness guaranteed by a well organized social system that increasingly combines with science to take the place of religion. Individual greatness and heroism is good, for what it is, but such greatness (particularly when based on actual actions rather than media creation) is damaging, for it makes others more responsible and less happy, wishing for something they may not have. Take, for example, the attempted bombing at Christmas this past year. The bombing was foiled by individuals on the plane, individuals who took responsibility for their lives and that of their fellow passengers. Those women and men acted heroically. Yet I do not know the name of a single one of those people. Instead, modern culture immediately sought a hierarchical response. Rather than focusing on the heroism of the individuals who stopped the bomber, cultural media immediately began contemplating what part of the machinery of airport security had failed and how the government could step in to guarantee safety. It was not enough to honor the idea that individual responsibility saved lives. It was the job of some great benevolent machine to prevent the need for individual heroics because, of course, individuals cannot always be counted upon to be heroic.
On the radio several weeks ago, I heard a commentator discussing an article which examined the overall negativity of American culture. “I don’t see a difference,” he declared, “being critical of the country and its leadership is a healthy part of our culture. We’ve always done that.” Indeed, we have, but as I told my uncaring radio, the sense of helplessness, of loss of ownership, has never been so intense. As we lose individual responsibility as a cultural value, we also lose our sense of cultural empowerment. The idea that the government actually represents the people in any meaningful way is fading, replaced by a sense that there is an inevitable power structure, having very little immediate connection with the people, whose purpose is to enable the individual right to happiness. There is a rising sense of fate, a notion that the leviathan of government is far too massive for individuals to influence, and that notion of accepting the inevitable seems to be rapidly tumbling into nationwide depression and the evolution of a culture of systemic, rather than individual, responsibility.
Ironically, that loss of responsibility finds expression in practical terms as well. We find ourselves in the grip of structural responsibility, in a place not unlike that created by Soviet authority. In his book The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild tours a Russia emerging from the shadow of Stalin, and he notes the general state of collapse of the cities and even the public areas of the apartment buildings. He writes that in stark contrast to the squalid public areas, Russian homes are immaculate; those spaces are theirs. It is their “feeling about public property that was the problem. Until this changes, real democracy in Russia, a democracy that does not just go through the motions of holding elections but is built on people’s confidence that they themselves control the state, and not somebody else, is far off” (187). Sadly enough, the same could be said of modern America. We have lost the confidence that the people control the state. Instead, we feel impotent, coddled in the promise of happiness provided by the state, yet frustrated by the endless ineptitude of a bureaucratic dragon we feel we cannot slay. We are not emerging from the shadow of some tangible regime; we are sliding into the shade of cultural irresponsibility, seeking happiness that we view as a right, yet have no desire to pursue and make our own.
So when the radio begins to tell me about the impact of healthcare reform, I switch to the 80s station. It is not that I don’t care – quite the opposite. It is simply that I do not believe that healthcare, or much of anything else, can be meaningfully reformed until someone has the courage to face up to the cultural illiteracy that lies beneath the partisan dog and pony show. Until Americans realize that they are responsible for their own health and that their time is better spent in pursuit of happiness than pursuit of populism, legislation isn’t going to change a thing. People will continue to demand pills to solve everything and social safeguards to protect them from failure – and from spectacular success. As long as we live in fear of the effort and risk it takes to pursue happiness, we’re never going to catch it, and we’re never going to be mentally or emotionally healthy from the effort of the pursuit – no matter what they legislate.
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