Sunday, April 01, 2007
What Can't We Do?
I’ll answer my own question first, short form: not much. I read an article in Time magazine (next Monday’s issue) to the effect that we as a nation are obsessed at the moment with what we can’t do. In fact, says the author, we can do almost anything if we put our minds to it. His article is really more of an analysis of the liberal excesses of mid-century compared with the conservative excesses of recent years. His points are valid, but I’m going off on a side trip involving possibilities. Long time readers know how I love to digress.
To illustrate my conclusion (nice of me to put it in the first sentence, wasn’t it?) I’m going to tell a short story about the experiences of a church in Denver. Now, don’t panic, because I’m not going to deliver any moralizing, or claim that God did the work. It’s a Unitarian Church, and I’m pretty sure that if God thinks of Unitarians at all it’s just to say, “Okay, smart guys, you figured it out, or so you think, eh? Go ahead and take care of your own stuff!” That is, I doubt that God had anything to do with this story, other than as a bemused observer, maybe. The church was having a centennial celebration, well two of those actually since it was chartered in 1889 and again in 1890. Long story, that. Anyhow, there were two main ideas put forth by members of the church on how to celebrate the dual events. One was to redo the building, which was at that time about twenty-five years along from its last remodeling. The kitchen was horrendous, the sanctuary reminded me a lot of the cafetorium at my kids’ middle school (and if there’s a meeting space I truly hate, that cafetorium is it!), and as I recall parts of the place even smelled funny. So, that was a good idea. The other good idea was to charter a new congregation, since the denomination was (and still is, come to that) doing well and it seemed like a new church in the area would be a good legacy for a century of work.
Some people of course favored one of the other, and there was much hand-wringing over the fact that we didn’t have the resources to do both things. Until, that is, the minister stood up one Sunday morning and announced that we could do both things better than we could do either one alone. Was he crazy? We didn’t even know where the resources were going to come from for either project, and he figured we had what we needed to do both? He had to have stripped a gear or something. Except that he was right. I joined the committee that founded the new church (it’s called the Columbine Unitarian Universalist Church, and you can look that up if you want.) Others joined the committee to fix up the old dump. My volunteering took me away from the mother church for a couple of years. But once the new organization was up and running (an amazingly easy task, in retrospect) I went back and discovered, to my amazement, a totally remodeled facility with a state of the art kitchen, a great meeting space, and no odd smells anywhere. We, in short, did both, and both things worked out very well indeed.
All we need in America is to realize several things. First, and most importantly, is that we’re all Americans, we all love the place, and that by working together we can solve problems that frustrate even the most creative politicians. This is a government by the people, after all, and the best way to keep it that way is to get involved one way or another. Run for office, or run a campaign to bring about change, or at least donate some money and time to a cause. It’s okay to put yourself out there. It’s how some famous people got holidays. People like Washington, Lincoln, and King didn’t get famous by staying at home and complaining about things. One thing we seem to have forgotten is that there are some things that government does really well. Building roads, for instance, has been given over to private investors time and again, but in the end it’s the government who builds and maintains them. Even the Romans used public money for roads, and they were pretty much the original running dog capitalists of the Western world, so to speak. There are other things, too, maybe running the VA hospital system, even. While government can’t solve all our problems (and personally, I’d hate not having any problems) there are some problems that government is just better suited to handle than is any other conceivable institution. Government, in this country at least, is just us acting together for our mutual benefit. Why should I help fund a noise barrier for people along a freeway in Reno? Because I might want one along the freeway down the street in Southern Nevada and I can’t afford to build it myself, is why.
I can think of several things we could accomplish by working together a whole lot sooner than we’ve been able to accomplish them by letting government solve the issue. For instance, we as a people have been pretty good with public health issues. Almost never hear of anyone dying of polio any more, do we? Well, fifty years ago it was a scourge. Once people died from cholera, typhus, typhoid, all sorts of terrible things, but when we worked together we managed to virtually eliminate most of these diseases, and in fact completely eradicated smallpox in the wild. That’s a great record. What do you suppose we could do if, instead of relying on the paramilitary DEA to cut drug use, a strategy that by any sane analysis is a failure, we turned our public health expertise loose on drug abuse and addiction? Well, we turned our collective public health expertise loose on smoking tobacco, and it’s down sharply. Even the rate of drinking and alcoholism has dropped drastically since the day we stopped making it a government problem (with prohibition) and turned it instead into a public health issue. We’re good at that sort of thing. We can do it with drugs.
I’ll bet that somewhere amongst the great mass of my fellow Americans, probably collectively among us, is a real, workable solution to the problem of affordable health care. There’s almost certainly the solution to the major issues raised by global warming out there. Neither of these things probably requires strident insistence on any given position being the right one. Both require everyone being able to add their bit to the collective wisdom. Maybe a government health program wouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it. For instance, in Britain if you have the bucks, er, quid, you can get private medical care, the same as here. You can have your own room, in a private hospital, with whatever doctor you choose. That certainly sounds less dire than the strident opponents to any sort of Universal Health Care would like us to believe, doesn’t it?
We Americans have been solving big, seemingly impossible problems for centuries. I’m sure we can handle the paltry few we’re facing today. Want to give it a try?
To illustrate my conclusion (nice of me to put it in the first sentence, wasn’t it?) I’m going to tell a short story about the experiences of a church in Denver. Now, don’t panic, because I’m not going to deliver any moralizing, or claim that God did the work. It’s a Unitarian Church, and I’m pretty sure that if God thinks of Unitarians at all it’s just to say, “Okay, smart guys, you figured it out, or so you think, eh? Go ahead and take care of your own stuff!” That is, I doubt that God had anything to do with this story, other than as a bemused observer, maybe. The church was having a centennial celebration, well two of those actually since it was chartered in 1889 and again in 1890. Long story, that. Anyhow, there were two main ideas put forth by members of the church on how to celebrate the dual events. One was to redo the building, which was at that time about twenty-five years along from its last remodeling. The kitchen was horrendous, the sanctuary reminded me a lot of the cafetorium at my kids’ middle school (and if there’s a meeting space I truly hate, that cafetorium is it!), and as I recall parts of the place even smelled funny. So, that was a good idea. The other good idea was to charter a new congregation, since the denomination was (and still is, come to that) doing well and it seemed like a new church in the area would be a good legacy for a century of work.
Some people of course favored one of the other, and there was much hand-wringing over the fact that we didn’t have the resources to do both things. Until, that is, the minister stood up one Sunday morning and announced that we could do both things better than we could do either one alone. Was he crazy? We didn’t even know where the resources were going to come from for either project, and he figured we had what we needed to do both? He had to have stripped a gear or something. Except that he was right. I joined the committee that founded the new church (it’s called the Columbine Unitarian Universalist Church, and you can look that up if you want.) Others joined the committee to fix up the old dump. My volunteering took me away from the mother church for a couple of years. But once the new organization was up and running (an amazingly easy task, in retrospect) I went back and discovered, to my amazement, a totally remodeled facility with a state of the art kitchen, a great meeting space, and no odd smells anywhere. We, in short, did both, and both things worked out very well indeed.
All we need in America is to realize several things. First, and most importantly, is that we’re all Americans, we all love the place, and that by working together we can solve problems that frustrate even the most creative politicians. This is a government by the people, after all, and the best way to keep it that way is to get involved one way or another. Run for office, or run a campaign to bring about change, or at least donate some money and time to a cause. It’s okay to put yourself out there. It’s how some famous people got holidays. People like Washington, Lincoln, and King didn’t get famous by staying at home and complaining about things. One thing we seem to have forgotten is that there are some things that government does really well. Building roads, for instance, has been given over to private investors time and again, but in the end it’s the government who builds and maintains them. Even the Romans used public money for roads, and they were pretty much the original running dog capitalists of the Western world, so to speak. There are other things, too, maybe running the VA hospital system, even. While government can’t solve all our problems (and personally, I’d hate not having any problems) there are some problems that government is just better suited to handle than is any other conceivable institution. Government, in this country at least, is just us acting together for our mutual benefit. Why should I help fund a noise barrier for people along a freeway in Reno? Because I might want one along the freeway down the street in Southern Nevada and I can’t afford to build it myself, is why.
I can think of several things we could accomplish by working together a whole lot sooner than we’ve been able to accomplish them by letting government solve the issue. For instance, we as a people have been pretty good with public health issues. Almost never hear of anyone dying of polio any more, do we? Well, fifty years ago it was a scourge. Once people died from cholera, typhus, typhoid, all sorts of terrible things, but when we worked together we managed to virtually eliminate most of these diseases, and in fact completely eradicated smallpox in the wild. That’s a great record. What do you suppose we could do if, instead of relying on the paramilitary DEA to cut drug use, a strategy that by any sane analysis is a failure, we turned our public health expertise loose on drug abuse and addiction? Well, we turned our collective public health expertise loose on smoking tobacco, and it’s down sharply. Even the rate of drinking and alcoholism has dropped drastically since the day we stopped making it a government problem (with prohibition) and turned it instead into a public health issue. We’re good at that sort of thing. We can do it with drugs.
I’ll bet that somewhere amongst the great mass of my fellow Americans, probably collectively among us, is a real, workable solution to the problem of affordable health care. There’s almost certainly the solution to the major issues raised by global warming out there. Neither of these things probably requires strident insistence on any given position being the right one. Both require everyone being able to add their bit to the collective wisdom. Maybe a government health program wouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it. For instance, in Britain if you have the bucks, er, quid, you can get private medical care, the same as here. You can have your own room, in a private hospital, with whatever doctor you choose. That certainly sounds less dire than the strident opponents to any sort of Universal Health Care would like us to believe, doesn’t it?
We Americans have been solving big, seemingly impossible problems for centuries. I’m sure we can handle the paltry few we’re facing today. Want to give it a try?
Labels: Social Commentary
