Asking to Starve a Nation to Death

How can it be that full-grown people, who have been to school for at least six or eight grades, can get all the way to Hurricane Sandy and never have understood that there are some things bigger than themselves?

"My god!", they say, "that damned thing is going to destroy the beach! And run down the street to the park, and fill the subways?" And, "Good Lord, what happened to our car? There is a lake over there, now!"

Then they try to call 911, but it is busy.

"Why isn't the Mayor doing something about this? Where is the Governor?"

The Mayor and the Governor are under water, and when they come up, if they do, they are going to try to call FEMA, and the President, and their Senators. "Where is the government when we need it?"

The government when we need it is the same government Grover Norquist has conned hundreds of elected officials to pledge they will starve into submission, until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub, as Mr. Grover Norquist has put it. They will not need a bathtub: the Atlantic Ocean and their local rivers are coming to them.

FEMA. Policemen. Firemen. Coast Guard. The National Guard. A national plan for energy and its distribution. What we allow to happen to our coastlines. Who can build what where? Hospitals. A way to provide medical care to those who need it. Who is taking care of the old people?

A person, even a young-enough, moderately strong, healthy person, did not build New York and New Jersey. No person built the Hoover Dam, nor the Brooklyn Bridge. Lots of people, together, did those things, and even those lots of people, together, could not have done it without the political, governmental fact of something bigger than they are. States cannot take care of some things better than the nation--as a nation--can. We need each other.

We need what every nation in the world knows--each other--in order to do what we can only do together. We need each other, by using the political and governmental systems and services, to protect our financial institutions from running wild, for building air traffic systems, and public spaces for all of us to use, for embassies and traffic cops and safe medicine. We need those art galleries where we display the most beautiful things we know, and we need a hell of a lot of really good public schools and universities and vocational schools. We need flu shots.

There is something obscene about politicians asking to be elected to office on the promise that they will starve government to death. They are asking to be elected to starve a nation into weakness; into death.

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