One of the biggest differences between political philosophies these days is the perception of the role of government in our society. I come to this from the perspective of a student of anthropology, sociology, political history and economics. Some of my knowledge and belief system comes from schooling, much from reading extensively, and some from discussions with others involved in the political process. Much of it comes from actually getting involved.
I am not a person who does sound bites well, so I will ask you to stick with me for a bit, rather than turning me off when I can’t give you instant and simple reasons for my beliefs. I do not believe these things because I am a Democrat, I am a Democrat because this is what I understand about the world I live in.
29 years ago Ronald Reagan made his famous pronouncement, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This has been interpreted by many as a license to attack government whenever possible, even while asking to be elected to run such a government. For some the goal is to “shrink government enough to drown it in a bathtub,” another famous quote from Grover Norquist, lobbyist extraordinaire.
I have a very different vision of my government that comes from getting involved at the local level with town committees and boards, including the selectboard. Learning about town budgets, employees, taxes, etc. as the person responsible for making it work gave me a different perspective. Standing outside and criticizing is easy. Actually making it work is very difficult. However, it is also very, very rewarding. And I don’t mean monetarily!
The rewards come from the people I have met, truly wonderful, smart, caring, thoughtful people who volunteer their time to make a town run. The pay stinks, but the rewards come when I have managed to involve some others in the process, because although we all moan about how hard it is, I know have introduced them to something that will enrich their lives and empower them to see what I see, that government is ultimately ours, and we make it or break it.
But when people hear over and over again that government is a problem, that “they” are taking away from, not adding to our lives, and that the best thing to do is elect people who promise to dismantle what, unfortunately, turns out to be the only thing between the voters and the rapacity of the greedy in all too much of our recent history, what are they to believe? It is easy to blame someone in “the government,” but we really are responsible, in our system, for electing those in the government and using care in doing so.
The people who founded this country and wrote our constitution did have a vision of how they wanted this to work. Their vision was of an educated public, who knew something of history and current affairs. This knowledge came from the written word, books, self-published pamphlets and newspapers. Today we have many, many ways to get information. So how do we get ourselves to the point where we actually consider electing people who think government is a problem, to run that government?
Part of it is schooling, and part of it is that explosion of ways to find out about how things work. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of the written word involved for too many of us. Most people now get their news from television, and there are a number of problems with that. Some of them have to do with the corporate ownership of the media, and some have to do with the way the brain reacts to TV. Part of our biological heredity is how movement in our field of vision affects us. We are instinctively compelled to focus on moving images, because back in the day when we were creatures in the wild, anything moving in the area was either food, or something that wanted to make food of us, or potential mates, all things we needed to pay attention to immediately.
Television is an endless series of movements to the visual field. Reading a book, or a magazine or newspaper or even articles on my laptop, I find it easy to pull myself away from the written word. But if there is a TV in the room it is constantly catching my attention and drawing my eyes, and I find myself sitting there almost hypnotized. Yes, hypnotized. Passive, waiting for direction. So what does that mean in an article about government?
If people are getting most of their information about how to choose their government from a medium that makes them passive, rather than interacting with the information, choosing what to read, stopping and thinking about it, maybe even writing about it, are they not vulnerable to being manipulated? If you watch TV for hours a day, you certainly are not likely to get involved. And if you are not involved, at least to some extent, is it not easy to see the government as not being of much importance to you and your life.
And yet everyday, governments at all levels of our society are making decisions that affect our lives. If our only interaction is once a year, or every two years, or even every 4 years, at the voting booth - and many of us choose not to even do that - how much effort are we going to put into finding out what is really going on? It is so much easier to sit in front of the TV and watch whatever we happen to find, including 30 second political ads, getting our emotions stimulated, and perhaps even being manipulated into voting against our own self-interest and the interests of the communities we live in. I don’t think we are lazy, I know we are tired and overworked, which is a subject for another post. I do suspect we are being used by clever people to find government a distant body that either has little to do with our lives or that actually is hurting us.
But that is not what our founders intended! And it is not what inevitably has to be. So when that neighbor of yours runs for office, or asks you to get involved, don’t say, “Oh, I don’t want to get involved in politics, it’s a dirty nasty business.” It is the business our founders intended us to be involved in deeply and thoughtfully. It’s our government.
My thanks to Al Gore who called my attention to the TV phenomenon in his book, The Assault on Reason.
