Morning Thoughts: January 22, 2018

America awakes this morning, shaking and cold from a national case of the DTs. What will happen is anybody’s guess.

As history would gleefully point out, this should be no surprise. We can be mean-spirited as a society or sub-society. Consider

- Our treatment of those who had settled this land before Europeans arrived,

- The American South before and after the Civil War,

- The era of Herbert Hoover and Joseph McCarthy,

- The horrible period of HUAC activity, and

- The rotting actions of governors like Orville Faubus, Ross Barnett, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox.

One of the textbooks used in teaching Public Administration to college students now is entitled Politics of the Administrative Process (Donald F. Kettl: Sage Publishing). It posits how managing government is an administrative process but one influenced heavily by politics.

Okay, but what happens when the balance of politics and administration gets out of balance? One instance, one which both interrupted and influenced my life, occurred during the mid-1960s. The decision to enter a civil war between two countries that posed minimal influence on America became a political one, one bereft of thoughtful administrative analysis. A president became politically trapped into participating in what is now widely considered to be a period of national insanity.

Some of us survived it. There resulted, however, a mournful wall of granite in Washington D.C. with over 58,000 names etched into it of Americans who didn’t. The black stones reflect only a fraction of the total deaths, not to mention the destruction, resulting from the use of human lives as political footballs.

That event mirrored another, earlier, when political decisions resulted in our carpet-bombing the country of North Korea, an act that still contains the seeds of the end of our planet as we know it.

It would be tempting to say that America is, once again, experiencing an imbalance between administrative and political decisions, only that isn’t true. There is no administration visible at the national level now, and little at some state levels. Our destiny is being determined largely by politics, some of which is setting new standards for greed and cruelty. Our cities, lonely entities in a sea of madness, plow on, but their inherent lack of power and dependence upon state and national sources for statutory enablement makes them frail crafts to tie to in the current storm.

It may help to calm our sense of despair if we remember that America can be a warm and nurturing place when it chooses. Consider

- The enactment of the 40-hour week for our workers,

- The establishment of Social Security to help our workers accommodate their senior years,

- The provision of unemployment insurance to protect workers from the whims of employers,

- The enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and

- The regulation of child labor and enactment of the minimum wage, and
- For a brief shining moment, the promise of health care for all.

No matter what one may have been made to think of these advancements, the millions of people who have benefited from them will stand witness to their goodness if there should ever be a day of judgement for nations.

How does this affect us? Our only hope, it seems to me, will be for us to start electing better people to office.