Back Briefly in the Villages, I am once again subjected to the discontents of the bourgeois, of how the government is ruining everything, told of how everything is going to hell.
But now, I am somehow (miraculously, even) beyond annoyance, and am just bemused.
Really! Really? No, Really.
One of the sublime ironies of this discussion for me is how the Villages are probably one of the best governed places in the country, not to say planet.. Everything works and is in order here. There are lots of rules, and people respect them.
Grant you, this is an oligarchic association inhabited almost exclusively by upper middle class white people from New England, the Mid- Atlantic and Mid- West. These are disciplined people, who know how to balance a checkbook and respect a red light.
They've got government in their DNA, coursing their veins and invigorating their very sinews. They are mostly mid to upper level bureaucrats who managed this country through the greatest economic boom in human history, a boom we are still enjoying.
Tonight I sat around a table and listened to people who all - everyone, without exception - had worked for the public sector their entire careers, as public servants in the military, the Portsmouth Naval Yard, as public school teachers and administrators, who are all retired in their 50's and early 60's on public (federal and state) pensions, Social Security and Medicare, universally abuse the government and decry its incompetence.
All without any apparent sense of irony or self criticism.
I posed questions that bounced back at me like duds off a cushion: is there any substantial difference between a publicly controlled bureaucracy and a corporate one? Isn't the substantial difference whether it exists to create value for shareholders (as per U.S. corporate law) or to advance the common good?
Isn't it in our interest to ensure that all bureaucracies and decision makers are held accountable to the public (general) good? Isn't democratic governance one of the few ways to pursue this end in our fallen world? Would it really be better to live in a world where everything was owned by a rich man, and we all were forced to bow and scape for some sort of contractual relationship with someone of wealth, where we had no recourse but to sell our labor to an overseer for the right to sustenance and shelter?
Isn't what the wealthy usually call socialism almost always a merely matter of regulating markets and guaranteeing that the economically disenfranchised maintain access to wealth necessary to their well being?
Regulation of markets, especially labor markets. The 40 hour week, workers comp, minimum wage, care for children, the sick, the elderly. Guaranteed access to food, shelter, education and healthcare. Guaranteed access to information, to markets.
It seems to me that we all benefit from the maintenance and advancement of the public good, of the public space.
I don't know. It seems to me that we can take care of one another, or else be left each of us uncared for. It seems we either fight for the common good, for mutual responsibility and benefit; or else descend into anti-social selfishness, disregard and irresponsibility.
We must either hang together, or be left to hang alone.
Just so. That all seems clear enough. Just as it seems we have yet another, similar, related choice: you can either be proud, angry and cynical or humble, bemused and amused.
I have had done with curses and cynicism. It's all worthless, it brings nothing.
Nothing but more bitterness and wrath.
Me, from now on I bless and laugh.
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