6/29/2010
For a decade now, we’ve been watching the unraveling of nearly every institution in which we the people used to place our faith. One by one they’ve toppled in our esteem, leaving many of us to conclude that most of the institutions that run our world are utterly hollow if not rotten to the core. With this loss of faith in the bastions of society has come a commensurate feeling that the government, which was supposed to protect us from bad institutions, did not always do so, at least in part because government itself is subject to those same institutions.
To recap, first there was Enron and the accountancy scandal, the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, the discovery that the American military practices torture, the scandals in the mortgage and housing markets, and then the lending market generally, ending with the collapse of the entire global economy two years ago. To top it off, Barack Obama, for all that he isn’t George Bush, is not what many people hoped he’d be, and so there is that disappointment. Now, still in the same decade we began, BP is dealing with the reality that they are slowly destroying the Gulf of Mexico.
If there is a silver lining to this whole chaotic, disastrous, heart-breaking mess, it’s the sense among people generally that things have gone far enough. And while they choose to express their agitation in unique and individual ways, they represent a broad scale of discontent. Much of that dissatisfaction is focused on the government, at all branches and levels.
People are mad at BP, but they’re also mad at the government for not protecting us from such problems in the first place. They’re mad at Wall Street, but they’re downright cynical about government’s attempts to look like it’s regulating them. People wanted health care, but not necessarily the giveaway to insurance companies that was ultimately enacted. In every instance there’s a feeling that government should be on the side of the people — and time after time, it’s not.
Worse still, people are getting the feeling that not only is the government not on their side — it’s actively fighting against them. Something seems to have changed and it’s the definition of democracy. After all, the highest court in the land recently affirmed that corporations are persons — just like you and me, only more so. Little people, as BP’s chairman recently referred to them, don’t stand a chance in a system that allows entities with unlimited money and power to compete with the people for access to the government. If the last thirty years are any indication, the corporations are winning.
People are not happy, and if there’s one thing that can reasonably be predicted from that assumption, it’s that action will follow. Happy people don’t seek change. Unhappy people get up and do something, if only because it’s become intolerable not to.
Action can take many forms, as we’ve seen from examples around the world. Some people who are good at that sort of thing take to the streets. Others form action groups and work on the political system. Some put up lawn signs and clamor for the right to vote. Others — we used to call them refuseniks — simply refuse to go along with the program, whatever that program might be. And still others take a different path altogether than that of the dominant paradigm.
There will be change in the coming years, almost inevitably, because people are so fed up. It will not come from a top-down government program or law, or be read into the group mind from the pulpit or the video screen. It will come as the natural result of people doing things differently.
But more importantly, change will come because people feel differently. Maybe we feel it’s time to stand up for ourselves, and to stand for something beyond ourselves. Perhaps we’re starting to remember that our government is based on the notion that all people are created equal, and that we are granted the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a government of, by, and for the people.
It would be nice if we could say that our present government still fulfills what those proud words proclaim. But we the people still exist, and the will of the people is powerful, if only we could persuade ourselves to use it. If we want the government to be for the people, we have to insist on it, and then help to show a better way.
