AIR WATER FOOD - we must get these things right

Samuel Johnson.

"Have a Nice Day"

Which in no way means that people haven't formed associations for helping others or helped others on their own.

It's always been a balance between the two. Yes, we're individualistic. Yes, we balance that with concern for others. Our pursuit of happiness and enjoyment of rights is balanced by social trust and interconnections. We lost the balance. It's not that either is bad. It's that one without the other is bad.

If you have individualism and the goal of helping others, it means it's up to you. Action is your own personal social responsibility. Most people don't think it's up to them anymore, and quite a few people here have told individuals that this kind of self-organizing/community-helping activity is at odds with the idea of government--it says that the goals of individual, often grassroots organization at odds with government priorities are out of line. To ask for a tax deduction because you've contributed to such an organization is to thwart the common taxing authority and reduce collective action.

My mother and father had different attitudes on this. My mother's attitude was that it wasn't her responsibility to help the poor, help the sick, etc. That was what government was for, and she paid the bare minimum required while complaining sotto voce. She looked out for herself, but government was also to look out for her. That was enough. It was only when government botched it that she was forced to help others while complaining that government needed to be bigger (and others needed to pay taxes, not her), and even then her helping others was contingent upon her own personal history. She helped with a woman's shelter because she considered herself to be a victimized woman and could empathize with victimized women. Not the poor, responsible for their own poverty (unless female), not the sick and injured (unless battered women). She could look at somebody asking her for help and point blank say, "That's a pity, government should do more." And walk away because it wasn't her responsibility. Government screwed up.

My father's attitude was that government tended to overreach and do things in a hamfisted way. Many who were helped didn't need it as much as many who weren't helped. You outsource control to politicians and strangers and professional paper-pushers and you lose all sense of humanity. At the same time, he helped people by doing handy-man repairs for those who needed repairs. Donating food. Mowing the yards of people who were sick. Even handing off money, if my mother didn't notice, to people who were poor and in dire straits. He was big into volunteerism when he could find the time. My mother was okay going to work at 6:30 a.m. and letting me get up, dress, and get myself to school ... when I was 7 and 8 years old. My father snuck away from work to make sure he was home for 20 minutes to make up I was up, dressed, ate, and left. My mother's attitude was that preschool day care was the government's job, not hers.

If this is primarily government's responsibility, then my mother was right. I show my Xian love for others by filing the proper W-form with my employer. There, I have maxed out love for my brothers and sisters in Christ by my bimonthly deduction and filing my 1040A. Now I can go back to pursuing what's really important, my happiness. No social trust needed. No need to know my neighbors. No need even for the poor to be humble in spirit, or for the sick to be grateful for help. Humility and gratitude, like Xian charity and service, are mediated by the one mediator, the triune government, the father, courts, and holy congress. This I don't find as a Xian value. Nor has it been an American value until fairly recently. It's not even a consistent American value. I know lots of people who don't want to be infantilized.

But if government does it and we're relieved of this responsibility, what's left? Americans have usually had to balance individualism with social responsibility and helping others. Cases can always be found where that didn't happen; racism is overlaid on top of this, so perhaps a church wouldn't help across racial boundaries and only in their own community. (We still hear calls for "giving back to the community", which is really the same kind of in-group assistance in a slightly different place.) But take away the balance, and you're left with individualism. The pursuit of happiness. It's no longer even the centralizing, "Ask what you can do for your country, not what your country can do for you?" No, it's more like, "Meh, let somebody else do it. That's their job."

Even Kennedy's formulation is a break from older values. After all, the "country" is a big, anonymous place and it's often a lot easier to ask what you can do locally. He may have had local endeavors in mind, but he also had in mind some rather large, centralized, federal-government-organized things. When one of the Bushes suggested restoring local initiatives under local control, it was ridiculed. But you can't have personal relations mediated by a $1 trillion federal government. It's just that some communities have no social trust for locals, for a variety of reasons. And change in cultural attitudes is slow in coming.

But what could my Boy Scout patrol do for the country? Not so much. What could it do for the community? It could spend every Saturday for a summer pulling trash and junk out of a patch of wetlands. The troop could work with foresters to thin a couple of acres of woodlands that had been replanted 30 years before after being logged.

What could my church do for the country? Not so much. It helped its own and had excess widow's fund tithes. It could pitch money every month at somebody who dealt with the poor that were referred to her, a sort of one-person WIC/housing voucher program. She collected information, visited people, and would take them to buy groceries and return receipts to the churches that gave her $. She'd pay the landlords directly. She was on disability, couldn't hold a job, and this was her way of giving back--the only profit she got was a few dollars gas money per month. It could organize church-internal events and otherwise just preach that we should help others. Many did. It's contribution was social trust. It built social capital.

What could I do for my country? Ooh, I could sign up for some government, national program. Not. For a few years I could spend one or two afternoons per week during the school year at Head Start, and all day one or two days every week during the summer . Or I could visit a widow who's stove had died and when I ask if I can help myself to a glass of water, measure her old stove and have a new one delivered anonymously. I could help buy a poor family a gravemarker for their dead infant. Volunteer with a bunch of friends to help refurbish a house a young, struggling family managed to borrow a down payment for--install carpet, paint, do yardwork, etc.; the work had to be done to bring it up to standards before the mortgage would be approved ... by the federal sponsoring agency (the down payment came from the church . Perhaps I could send cash through the mail with no return address to help another poor family. I could even volunteer to teach literacy or reading or English to immigrants. And I've been told that all these things are properly the domain of government, if only we forced others to pay more in taxes (because my income was below the median, so why should I pay more when others could easily afford more?). Tax money should pay teachers, beef up Head Start, provide more for the poor. But you know, those Head Start kids and parents knew we were there not because of a paycheck but because we wanted to help. The widow new somebody else cared about her, not some paper pusher. The young struggling family knew that we had their back, not necessarily some nameless software 3000 miles away.

But if I believed that the primary responsibility for helping my fellow Americans were politicians in DC or in Austin, complete strangers who hire somebody to hire a staff to hire workers to process paperwork ... That nice personal trust that encapsulates social trust and Xian brotherhood ... I probably wouldn't have done most of that. Then again, I'm old fashioned and take after my father. (BTW, father was (R), mother was (D). My mother was also the racist in the family, and thought that all that money spent on NASA was a waste when there were starving women and children. And, sadly, yes, I was told to eat my dinner because there were starving Armenians. Or had been, 50 years earlier.)

You can be in favor of government help and then say that that's what Jesus or whoever had in mind. Your job's done. But ultimately social trust isn't between me at strangers 3000 miles away, it's between me and those I meet. Naionalism-free governments, where the loyalty is to a political system and not to a community, isn't very satisfying. And we aren't built for 300-million-person communities. If you don't love the brother that you see, how can you say you love the brother you don't see by paying taxes to some anonymous government so they can help him, you guess?