Only 14 percent of registered voters say members of Congress deserved to be re-elected, and 84 percent think it’s time to throw the rascals out and give “someone else a chance,” according to a recent New York Times/CBS news poll. Twelve percent of those polled think Congress does a reputable job, which matches its historical low. (Pollsters were not able to plumb the figures any deeper to determine what Congress had done to make those 12 percent so supportive.)
There are two elements to the poll’s results that should be kept in mind: First, the complexity of our troubled economy is beyond any legislative fix that Congress could imagine. They talk the game because that’s what we ask them to do. They could help at the edges, but there isn’t any step 1, step 2 and step 3 program that eliminates unemployment, restores our balance of trade, upgrades our educational system and keeps all costs low. Second, despite this reality they continue the charade in a highly partisan sense, both parties forcefully arguing that they could actually solve things if the other party didn’t exist.
This is what the public sees and why it reacts so negatively. It’s like watching 8-year-olds do battle, while the public eggs them on.
But the problem runs deeper than that. The government is much larger than the 535 members of Congress. We have the executive branch of government, whose job it is to make sure the trains run on time, and hundreds of thousands of additional people employed to keep things just as they are, or to enrich themselves, regardless of the impact.
Why is this? Because we have developed a built-in expectation that the government is responsible for curing all ills, no matter our collective idiocy. It’s a little like the health care system being expected to cure all our ills, no matter our lifestyle choices.
There are obvious responsibilities that must be borne by our government, including public safety, the collection of taxes, the maintenance of income security programs, etc. But can we really expect our legislators to be our saviors for all ills?
At the moment, that’s our expectation and we have an entire sub-economy employed with the expressed purpose of figuring out ways to tap the system so that they or their clients profit. It has spun so far out of control that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Washington Post he had no clue just how many people the department employed, or how much money was truly being spent. His is not an isolated case.
But the expectations persist.
And how is that working for us?
It’s a difficult thing to attack. Humans have a natural instinct to want to help, and to take control. And we think we are better at it than we are because we take all challenges and reduce and simplify them to something that matches our answers.
It would almost be funny if it weren’t so costly and so damaging to our national psyche.
The answer is not to give up; but to set for ourselves a more realistic set of expectations. We need to first realize that there is no single catalog of answers to anything.
We need to step back from absolutes and understand the power of the give and take that represents human nature. We can’t be at war with ourselves and progress. Until we find our balance, we will continue to degrade the efforts of those who lead us, which just ramps up the partisanship that stops progress in its tracks.
It starts with us.
By Emerson Lynn,
St. Albans (Vt.) Messenger
