Continuous Barrage

Our culture is full of trends that incense all sides (and also interesting that all “sides” feel put upon by “the system.”).

Obama has tried to govern instead of being a transforming figure. Held hostage to the Ivy League brotherhood, it seems. Where is a real strategic review? We have some measures of operational and tactical brilliance, but a general wrongheaded strategy.

We send at least $300B a year to foreign oil producers, many of whom are directly or indirectly hostile to us. Our lack of energy independence means we are funding our enemies. And that’s just the direct money. The indirect effects of our oil addiction run into the trillions. Plus all that money is needed money, vitally needed money, that is not spent on investing in worthwhile things—worthwhile things for America itself and ourselves.

While Obama’s understanding of the effects of oil addiction is good, his prescriptions are often uneven or off. Trumpeting ethanol and E85 pumps? Foolish, wrongheaded. Ethanol is an utterly losing proposition for a lot of reasons, grain competition (in a world already short of grain), just one of them. Some of his other prescriptions are equally as wooly headed.

Obama’s chapter on politics is a sobering appraisal of how we have a system—media included, not just the parties, pundits, and special interests—that is disgustingly sick.

He well describes how the “balancing act between self-interest and community” has become wobbly. In Washington, Obama says, the scrambling for campaign money, amidst a distracted (or worse) press/media, and with lobbyists pressing on representatives relentlessly, means representatives’ views become distorted, and survival-at-all-costs becomes paramount.

This idea has become ingrained that you don’t SERVE in government anymore, except perhaps to serve yourself. No, government employment becomes merely a springboard to go on to something else, something jazzier or at least more lucrative. The number of those who champion the plight of the voiceless is small.

As Obama points out, 20% of all patients account for 80% of the healthcare usage in this country. And "his" plan, which the health care industry diluted, looked not bad given that premise. The entire tenor of that showed his lack of executive experience and his tax cutting and spending cut evasion showed his lack of firmness. Nuance and complexity in him appear to be very good, but compromise and weakness are displayed excessively, leading to charges of weak principles. Even in his book, Obama flubs words frequently, using some terms that would be better unsaid or said a different way.

I agree with Obama that government is both shaped by, and shapes , culture—for better and for worse. We probably have skewed views of what government can and should do. Our system is, by its nature, one where government to accomplish something is hard. Government to demolish, things, however, is easy if you know how to work the right levers or withhold or divert the money. And we have seen it is all too easy, chillingly easy, to stifle dissent.

A government can’t provide everything and shouldn’t even if it could. But a government that provides too much can indeed take away much—or even effectively enslave.

As a fellow teacher has said, those who decry government in general get a little hem-hawed when it comes to specifics. Funding Justice Dept? Military? Center for Disease Control? CIA? NSA, FAA, highways, clean water, safe food, police and fire protection, teachers, public parks and lakes, a congressman’s office we can call to get some resolution, etc.? It’s naïve or uninformed to think these do not have a cost or aren’t worthwhile; it’s hard to imagine present day civilization without them.

Neo-conservatives fail to understand or acknowledge what their lives cost on a local, state, and national scale, or, even when they do, their wealth makes it all invisible anyway. Leaving most everything up to voluntary participation is, at best, often inefficient. A person may want to use the roads, for example, but doesn't want to pay for them, counting on someone or someones to pay or upkeep (this is a phenomenon known as free-riding or tragedy of the commons).

Democrats rarely recognize that taxes have a ceiling. Republicans rarely recognize that taxes also have a floor, that you can’t cut taxes too much without defunding those things I just mentioned. Libertarians sometimes get fantasy-like, or a little extremist, or even almost anarchist, when discussing not supporting “the government,” like it is some robot entity to be unplugged. For comparison, there are places in the world where there is no government, no rule of law, where complete “freedom” exists. I’m rather guessing that places like Somalia are not where most people would want to go, however.

America suffers from being too individualistic a society, and yet the things we are doing are setting us in an even further intensification of this hyper-individualism, where everyone (or at least whatever nuclear family exists) is on their own.

We then get a kind of arrogance and disdain that builds up: The healthy, wealthy, and/or lucky hold in contempt those who aren’t, forgetting the adage that “there but for the grace of God go I.” Yes, we don’t need to rescue people from their willful stupidity or lack of work ethic or character, but we also don’t need to discard people who merely have little money, or are sick, or are down on their luck. We should remember the connection of humanity, and that a globalized world has only made that more intensely so. Not only does discarding them diminish us as human beings, but it also sets in motion the plight of the desperate, which we, if we were paying attention, should know by now: desperation leads to having little to live for, which means having little to fear, which can mean being very angry, which can mean being susceptible to demagogues who twist and radicalize and make lethal pawns willing to die and take a lot of other people and places with them. Or bring on repression.

It isn’t too much to expect that working full-time should pay something livable. Not extravagant, not with all the “things” that Americans have told themselves (and been marketed to) that they “need,” but with the basics. Enough to live a basic and healthy life, but one that would still leave great desire in the moderately ambitious to want to achieve more.

Yet we don’t have that today. We have not just one parent, but two, working, and still not being able to make it, because minimum wage is too little when the nuclear family must provide for everything, with no underlay by the society in anything—child care; quick, safe, and affordable public transportation; basic health programs; healthy and affordable local food; integrated neighborhood law officers, etc.

The stress on American families? Immense and intense. Two working parents, or worse, one parent period. With our individuality extremism, combined with all the things which disconnect us, the nuclear family has to do it all—meeting the bills, looking after children, maintaining a household, and trying to maintain a relationship, are just the key ones, let alone if taking care of a parent or something else is added. This leads to high levels of stress, and as we know but rarely do anything about, stress has extreme impacts on health, even long-term health, plus productivity, work, energy, enthusiasm for life, and of course relationships. One of the stats that Obama cites (336), that parents today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than they did in 1969, is an obvious reflection of the fact that both probably must work, and that employers are more demanding of time than ever. Children are left at home in front of the TV or computers, or with sub-standard sitters. Employed mothers lose an hour of sleep a day trying to get it all done.

“Not my problem. I’m not my brother’s keeper. I/we are going to move somewhere better.” And so Americans have paid premium prices for homes in safe neighborhoods with better schools. But their incomes have not really risen to do so, especially when all the expenses of daycare, second cars, etc. are factored (I have read the book Obama references on this). More stress. We keep thinking we can always run away from the problems, and keep them “there.” But as I’ve said many times in this forum, that is an illusion.

Americans have often been foolish too. Preschool tuition money (and preschool much of anything outside of play with other children and respect for parents and adults in general) is largely wasted, I’m afraid, so I disagree with Obama there. Forcing kids to go to college (what happened to the desire when they were READY?), and then paying the tuition, only to have emotionally immature Johnny do poorly, largely from apathy, is another unnecessary drainer. Buying houses that are too big, or worse, constantly house hopping for something “better” or the “dream home,” only to find that mortgage companies and banks have taken all your money in fees and interest and you haven’t made any progress; no sanity in that.

Employees have not been sharing in the rising productivity, much of which has come from those employees. This is eerily and disturbingly reminiscent of the 1920s, when employees also did not share in rising productivity. As their wages fell further and further behind, they borrowed more and more to try to keep up, but it was a house of cards waiting for the fall. That is one of the reasons why historians like to say that the Depression was coming one way or another, and for some, had already been in place. The Crash of 1929 was therefore merely the catalyst, the accelerator, the match, the lead domino (choose your metaphor), not the cause. It merely brought into immediacy the forces that were moving in that direction anyway.

While I think Obama is correct that unions need less discrimination against them, and that labor in general needs more protection (instead of the anti-protection it has had in many cases), I do not necessarily agree with him that unions should be allowed to form on the basis of signed cards. The case for not having a secret ballot has never been a convincing one to me, especially when those ballots are protected by outside independent parties or by government. He cites no counter-evidence, so this looks to me like an unexamined proposition.

Obama and others question idolizing the free-market. So do I. They question how easy and how often we have reached for the militarism lever in the last 60 years. So do I.

Obama mentions that Jeremiah Wright gave him the phrase that became the title of the book. Wright’s a mixed figure. On the one hand, Wright’s an angry person with questionable judgment in how he speaks, and with little graciousness. On the other, whatever he says gets dismissed out of hand, when we would be wise to pay attention to underneath are some things that are instructive if we overlook the messenger.

Anyone begging for mercy yet? More waiting in the wings! :)