Who Is ‘Government’?

President's Corner

Have you noticed that the mode of the day — especially around election time — is to be hypercritical of all things labelled “government”? Candidates call for dismantling government and decreasing government “power” as reasons for running for elected office — in the government.

Some candidates (many of whom have been in public office for years) rally voters with a call to “take our country back!” Who are they taking it back from? From the government, presumably.
If I were an outsider looking in, I would wonder who or what is this evil government thing.

Government, like our democratic republic, is a concept conceived and made manifest by the people. It gives structure to an agreement about how we will manage the public space or work collectively to accomplish together what we may not be able to accomplish alone.

Why, then, do we feel the need to decry the government as malicious and those who work for it as soulless aliens? They are wives and husbands, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, neighbors and military veterans. Criticizing people simply because they serve as members of a governing entity you do not support does nothing to benefit our society — yet such criticism and dehumanization runs rampant.

Those who criticize government say, “I don’t need any help — I can do it by myself. The government just gets in the way.” Then those people leave their houses, get in their cars and drive down the government-funded highway without thinking about the fact they certainly could not have built that road alone. Unless they home-school their children in the truest sense, the critics send them to a public school that receives government funding.

If they opt for a private school, chances are it’s not necessarily privately funded. Rather, it’s co-funded by agreement of several individuals or families — just as the government was founded by agreement of its citizens. In fact, public schools were created and funded by agreement as well. Citizens agreed to tax themselves, through an agreed-upon process, to support schools for the children of their community.

Certainly, entrepreneurial spirit, individual effort and discipline are not discounted to any degree. Our country was founded on those ideals. However, we need to cease some of the negative political rhetoric and clean up the social space we share and make it safer and more wholesome for our children and grandchildren — our posterity.  

I mentioned in my previous column how difficult it is to do the work we need to do when we are met with constant criticism about what some consider the deplorable state of our public school system. In his book, The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge describes these dispositions, or mental models, as “[d]eeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures and images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.”

Perhaps we all should pause and examine our dispositions about what it means to be a citizen of this republic. Those who oppose government and those who support it talk quite a bit about the U.S. Constitution, signed more than 200 years ago by delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. For the people of the United States to secure its posterity and the blessing of liberty, to promote the general welfare, to provide for the common defense, to ensure domestic tranquility and to form a more perfect union, it takes we the people — all the people.

Without some common experiences like those typically provided in public schools, can we remain “we the people”? Can we remain “one nation, under God, indivisible”? Join me in the conversation on Twitter at #tellyourstory.