My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #12, September 19, 1997

If we in fact have a fairly effective invisible government, as I told you last week, it is for sure not because we, as citizens, pay attention to it. It is because, as the saying goes, God takes cares of fools, drunkards and the United States.

Most Americans just aren't all that interested in government. Oh, sure, we'll get worked up about some big social problem from time to time, and we'll holler for our politicians to fix it. And when a law gets passed, we figure that's taken care of, and we go back to our usual pursuits. We don't pay attention long enough to ask whether the fix worked, whether the leg our congressional surgeons amputated was in fact the one that was gangrenous. We forget there might be an "Oops."

The fact is, there are many things we want done for us without our having to think about them. We want our trash picked up and taken away, our fires put out, our water tested. We want our roads to be repaired and plowed. We want somebody to teach our children to read and write and add and subtract. We want somebody to rescue us if our car crashes.

Over time, we have gotten into the habit of asking government to perform these services and many, many others that we don't want to be bothered with personally. (Government is just one of many systems that allow us to live 90% of our life on automatic pilot.) And then we go back and watch TV and forget about government until something goes wrong. Which is kind of like building a nuclear power plant, starting it up, and leaving it untended.

We forget, or do not understand, that certain risks are inherent in government:

1. Corruption
2. Unimaginative rule-bound proceduralism
3. Resistance to change
4. Self-aggrandizement and concentration of power
5. Threats to individual freedom
6. Its errors can be catastrophic

You see, there are people who DO care passionately about government because of what government can do for them. The gun lobby cares. The tobacco lobby cares. The military-industrial complex cares. And they are willing to spend endless time and money talking to politicians about their problems.

Put yourself in the shoes of any legislator and ask yourself how easy it will be for you to remember the problems of ordinary people you don't hear from all that often, when you are in the daily company of people who understand you, support you, buy you lunch, donate money for your campaign, and tell you how important you are. And when the interests of these friends conflict with the interest of the general public, those boors who make such nasty jokes about politicians, whose interests are going to resonate with you more? (That's the process by which our forest service has become an agency that builds roads into national forests to make it easier for lumber companies to clearcut old growth trees.)

Now that's an explanation, not an excuse. But if we do not involve ourselves with government, our voices and interests will always be drowned out by the voices of those with much to gain from government. All the campaign finance reform in the world is not going to change that--current campaign finance rules, after all, are the reforms that were put into place because of the corruption of the Watergate era.

Any large institution becomes a machine that maintains order and stability. The more we ask it to do, and the larger it becomes, the more it guides itself by formal rules and procedures. Thus there is a dead weight of resistant inertia inherent in any government or large business. The only way it will change is if it is forced to, by strong leadership, by competition, or by citizen revolt. That's why strong social movements always begin outside the government--the J. Edgar Hoovers by nature will be far more interested in trying to destroy the movements and their leaders than in making the government more just.

A government is to power what a black hole is to light--it tends to absorb it all. That's why our founders deliberately created competing power centers in our government. It doesn't make for speed or efficiency, but while people are busy defending their turf, there is time for deliberation, and it is likely that a wider variety of views will be considered.

It is because our founders also understood that government prefers to control information that they began by telling government what it could NOT interfere with--freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion. Government always regards reporters with suspicion, because they reveal what the government would just as soon keep secret. Naturally government is even more deeply suspicious of the internet--not only is it full of untrammeled free speech, it is dispersed and uncontrollable free speech. (Much of it disrespectful of government, too.)

What all of this means for us is, if we want the government to serve us better, we have to start paying attention to what it's doing. That means more than simply deciding after watching a few political ads on TV who we're going to vote for. It means finding out what those candidates plan to do, what they have already done, and who is backing them. This objective and verifiable information is readily available on the internet.

So why do so few people pay attention? How dare they mindlessly believe political ads on TV? How dare they sit around and complain about politicians when they have never voted? How dare they let the corporations buy the candidates because they have never contributed to or worked for candidates they believed in? How dare they LET the bad guys take over?

Thinking about the issues and the candidates is only half the job, however. We need to know what our invisible government is doing. I challenge you to look in the government section of your phone book. Look at the different departments of your city and county government. Do you know what they do and how well they do it? If not, call them and ask them what their purpose is. Then ask yourself some questions:

1. Is this work that needs to be done?
2. Is this a job that should be done by government?
3. Is there another way of achieving the same objective?
4. Are there jobs it should be doing but is not?

And if you have a LOT of time on your hands, take a look at the U.S. Government Manual, our guide to what every agency of the U.S. government does, and ask those same questions.. Be prepared to be astonished at all the things you didn't know our government was doing. Be prepared to be grateful for many of them--you may not have realized, for instance, that the Library of Congress is the provider of Books for the Blind, let alone that it is cataloger in chief for libraries all over the country. Be prepared to wonder why some of these agencies, like the Rural Electrification Agency, still exist.

Then ask yourself which agencies you think we could do without, and which agencies are urgently important for public welfare. Ask whether the important agencies have enough money to do their job. If we want meat inspection, are we funding enough inspectors and laboratories? If we want public hospitals to treat the uninsured, are we spending enough money to keep them open and staffed?

Ask yourself why we asked government to do these jobs in the first place. Was it because we didn't want to deal directly with people we had conflicts with? Was it because we didn't want to personally aid the poor, the elderly, the unfortunate? Or was it because these were jobs that impacted everybody's well-being, that everybody should pay for with their taxes?

Because if we don't know what we want government to be doing, and don't tell our politicians what services are important to us, what will happen when taxes are cut? Will cancer research be reduced? Restaurant inspections? Water treatment? Road re-surfacing? Bridge and dam inspection? Will there be fewer sandbags available the next time the Mississippi floods, less road salt available when blizzards hit?

And then we need to monitor those services to make sure they are performing. We need to back up our demands by voting, by campaigning for candidates, by ringing doorbells, by contributing. We maybe even need to run for office ourselves.

We may also need to organize ourselves, because the $25 check we can afford to send does not speak as powerfully as a $1000 check from GTE or ADM. The biggest obstacle for citizens who care is the sense of powerlessness of any one individual, the conviction that what we want and what we do doesn't matter. But every important social movement has started with someone who said "I won't." "I won't move to the back of the bus." "I won't work 60 hour weeks without overtime pay."

There are places we can go for ideas, liberal, conservative, and libertarian. Columnist Neal Peirce regularly reports on city, regional and state governments that are doing innovative things to improve the lives of their citizens. I recommend Michael Moore's book, Downsize This!, and William Grieder's book Who Will Tell the People? There's Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual. There are many third, fourth, and fifth parties--the New Party, the Green Party, the Libertarians(yes, I think they do have some good ideas), and many others, which have well-thought out platforms for change. There are organizations at all points along the political spectrum doing valuable work--ACORN, Habitat for Humanity, the Catholic Worker and other religion-based organizations, a number of social action groups reachable at Essential.Org, and many others that are solving community problems themselves instead of waiting for the government to do it.

Mind you, we've turned a lot of power over to our governments, probably more than we would have if we'd thought about it more carefully, and they won't give it back gracefully. Government by short attention span is like housekeeping by short attention span--because we didn't do it on a routine basis, the cockroaches moved in. It's going to take a fair amount of elbow grease to drive them out again. But you know what? If we can make our government ours again, we might be able to regain some of that optimism about ourselves and our country that has turned so sour in the last 30 years.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.