Carla and the other folks at Preemptive Karma have been good to us--quick with a trackback, solid collaborators and offline sounding boards. There's been a spate of things lately at Also Also that have piqued their interest, and while I've been following their commentary I've neglected to point out several good pieces. Carla's done two in two days that I think address the overarching themes that need to be brought up again and again until we start getting them right: this is not how we want government to respond, either through insufficiency or ignorance--and this is not the way Americans treat each other.
Yesterday's item more directly addresses the first question: what foundation of principles does our notion of governance rest upon?
I want a country with a strong, centralized government that protects and respects the rights of individuals first and foremost (as opposed to groups or the majority). I want a country that promotes liberty and justice for all people, including those that aren't our citizens. I want a country whose rule of law is based in the laws our founders determined best, that of English Common Law.
Well, at least we have the 'centralized' part right. Some of the commenters offer their own visions, some more narrowly personal than others ("I want a government that buys me a pony.") Walker Willingham, whose own blog follows up at his place with a wonderfully pragmatic assessment of the liberty/order tension:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
And today Carla focuses in on a story that continues to bother me as I read more of it: the refusal of Gretna officials to allow an exodus from the Convention Center to leave New Orleans and cross over into the rest of Louisiana--starting with Gretna. Accounts vary, from a first handed account to various wire rehashes of interviews with two paramedics who were among the crowd. But the repeated story is that in trying to use the Crescent City Connection out of town, they were definitively and unyieldingly blocked access out of New Orleans. Why? "To protect our assets."
As a commenter in that thread points out, there's no room to be high and mighty here in Whitey Central, OR. This isn't about southern racists, it's about people with views of prosperity that starts at their mailbox and ends at the back fence, and who create fear fantasies of unknown people based on what the local Fox affiliate presents as news. Read the accounts of the townspeople--black and white, they claim--that back the police chief of Gretna by referencing the nonstop killings, corruption and sloth afflicting New Orleans. They're not talking about the people on the bridge--especially since 250 or so of them were VISITING IN A HOTEL. The people they're talking about are the ominous 'they.'
Policies, both social and fiscal, that play the fears of one group off another are as old as feudal government and beyond. So this is nothing new. But it's getting mighty old.
--TJ
Comments