Sailing To Oblivium

To an alarming percentage of Americans, the three dirtiest words in politics are compassion, cooperation, and compromise. How did we get here? It’s taken a while, and it is exacting a terrible toll.

It doesn’t make sense. At least it doesn't to me on this first day of July, 2017

We are being told that America was great when it eschewed these fine principles. I suppose that means the height of the Jim Crow era in the South, the depths of the Great Depression nationwide, or maybe during the debacle in Southeast Asia for men who were young during my early manhood.

I’m not sure I would place a five-star rating on such periods of our history. I say this partly because of a study I read while in Graduate School. In it, the writer employed an operational taxonomy for public bodies whereby individuals were divided into two categories, guardians and advocates.

Guardians, as we might guess, represent a class of managers with philosophies tending toward so-called libertarianism, i.e. spend no more to maintain their city or state than absolutely necessary.

Advocates represent the opposite style of management. The spend freely on new ideas as well as necessities.

The author studied governing bodies that could be logically classified as fitting into one of the two categories. Guess what? Entities managed by guardians tended to be rusting, decaying, moribund places. Entities managed by advocates tended to teeter on the verge of financial disaster, if not actual bankruptcy at any given moment.

A third category represented polities that were managed by a combination of the two types of management. Through mutual cooperation and equal influences, they provided a healthy environment for those in their care.

What happens when we don’t pursue the last course? Our infrastructure crumbles, people suffer and die because the wealthiest country on the planet won’t provide them basic health care, and we shut down our once fine public school system. How did we let this happen?

There are alarming trends in our political psyche these days. One is that we can have public services without exacting taxes to pay for those services. A sizable group of politicians even signs a pledge to an insidious jerk with access to funds, stating they will never vote for a tax of any sort. They used to punish young men, back in my day, who burned their draft cards, a similar, and one might say less insidious, type of blind dis-allegiance.

Adherents to another alarming trend posit that the government can, and should, solve all our problems, no matter what the cost socially or financially. The police should provide the nurturing and psychological counseling that our troubled youths need. The schools should rear our kids. Individual groups or races should bear no responsibility for their families, neighborhoods, cities, or state, but simply let the government handle it. But hell hath no fury like that exacted when the government doesn’t do it “our way.”

As a result, we’ve quit talking to one another. This allows a senate majority leader to say publicly that his job is to make sure that the sitting president of the United States of America fails. It further allows him to get away with it.

It allows a sitting president of the United States of America to post, in a manner that goes public world-wide in a second, personal and false statements about anyone who questions him. It further allows him to get away with it.

It allows an entire political party to swear its opposition to any idea, no matter how kind, compassionate, sublime, or desirable, that the opposition proposes, and to get away with it.

It allows too many people to live and rule by greed, ignoring the immortal warning of Thomas Gray in his immortal Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, that

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

I don’t know where this is all leading us, but it doesn’t appear to be a happy place.