We had an unforgettable time and were presented with frequent opportunities to reflect on what it means to be an American. Many of the people we met told us how much they admired our country. Some quoted leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; others expressed appreciation for the educations they had received in our universities, their partnerships with our corporations, and the many forms of assistance provided by our government, churches, and private foundations.
The comment I remember most, however, came from a young Peace Corps volunteer I met in Kathmandu, Nepal. To catch the bus that brought her to meet with me, she had walked ten hours from the remote village where she lived in a house without running water or electricity. She described the work she did at a school where nearly all the students were boys, since most girls were still denied schooling and were often married by the age of twelve or thirteen.
The volunteer loved her experience in Nepal but missed her family and all the blessings of daily life that she had taken for granted in America. She longed for safe drinking water that poured from faucets; meats and vegetables that she could eat without worrying they would make her sick; enough food to eat all year round; free public schools that taught both boys and girls; warm baths and electricity available around the clock; paved roads, and cars to drive on them.
Chelsea listened attentively, and I wished every American teenager could have been there with us. Americans enjoy so many blessings because generations before us paid the price to establish and maintain a stable, democratic government that protects our individual rights and provides public services that benefit us all. Most of our sons and daughters are lucky enough never to have known a time when millions of Americans didn’t have electricity or good roads. Except for the occasional contamination scare, they have no reason to fear the water they drink or the food they eat. They were not alive to witness the origins of many improvements government brought to American life—improvements neither individuals nor the private sector could adequately address. They don’t remember that many of the most important advances grew out of controversy and were achieved only after great effort.
Our children may not remember, but older African Americans who could not eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels or vote in elections surely do. Women who were not admitted into certain professions remember; so do those whose reflexes slowed before the federal government passed Title IX and opened up collegiate athletics to their daughters and younger sisters. Asian Americans who were told not even to apply for some jobs and Jewish Americans who were prohibited from buying homes in certain neighborhoods remember. Hispanic Americans who had no legal recourse against exploitative employers remember. Native Americans who lacked access to medical services before the expansion of the Indian Health Service remember.
Men who went off to fight in World War II and were welcomed home by a grateful nation and the GI Bill of Rights remember. They went to college, started businesses, bought homes, received medical care at veterans’ hospitals, and built the biggest, most prosperous middle class in the history of the world. No American is alive today who reached retirement before the advent of Social Security, but millions of older citizens depend totally on those checks and remember what their lives were like before Medicare.
Our children may not have witnessed any of these changes, but every noontime, millions of them fill school cafeterias, eating for little or no money thanks to the school lunch program the federal government started in 1946 after the discovery of widespread nutritional deficiencies among World War II draftees. Children breathe cleaner air in cities like Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Detroit because of the Clean Air Act. They fish, boat, and swim in once-hazardous bodies of water like Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River because of the Clean Water Act. One in four of them relies on Medicaid for health care.
When we’re reminded of the bounty and protection we enjoy, most of us, like that Peace Corps volunteer, are grateful. Our gratitude has its roots in a view of government that dates back to the Pilgrims and to the successive waves of immigrants who came to this country seeking religious and political freedom and better economic opportunities. In this view, government is an instrument both to promote the common good and to protect individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Americans’ attitudes about how the instrument of government should be used to achieve these ends have evolved with the nation’s circumstances. As we grew from a rural, agricultural society into a more urbanized, industrial one, citizens began to expect government to protect them from economic downturns beyond their control and from corporate unscrupulousness and greed. They expected government to do what it could to encourage economic growth and to create jobs, so that a middle-class standard of living could be within reach of anyone who was willing to work hard. During the 1960s, a majority of our citizens supported government action to guarantee civil rights to all Americans, regardless of race, sex, religion, or national origin; to improve educational opportunities throughout our nation; to take more aggressive action to alleviate the problems of poverty; and to assure senior citizens access to quality health care. In the 1970s, most Americans supported federal action to protect the environment and to assure greater safety in the workplace.
By the 1980s, however, faced with mounting economic and social problems, Americans began to question the ability of government to solve them. Many began to believe government itself was the problem. These feelings, along with the constraints imposed by our mounting national debt, slowed the pace of federal activism. Even those of us who are mindful of the progress we have made through government recognize that there are limits to what it can do. We reject the utopian view that government can or should protect people from the consequences of personal decisions or that it can legislate complete peace, harmony, and brotherhood.
This skepticism, too, has its roots in our history. In part, it has been handed down to us by the colonists who came to America partly to escape the British government’s arbitrary and absolute authority. They gave us the Constitution’s checks and balances and the Bill of Rights, both strong limits on government. But Americans’ wariness about government is also the legacy of the early adventurers, traders, and entrepreneurs who saw America as a land of rich natural resources waiting to be exploited by the fittest and most deserving among them.
Taken to its extreme, this perspective exalts private initiative and regards those who exercise it as deserving to flourish virtually unencumbered by any mandate to share the wealth or apply it toward solving our common problems or creating common opportunities. The role of government, in this view, is limited to functions like national defense and law enforcement. Thus individuals, families, and communities must exercise their own initiative and develop their own resources to maximize both public and private good. Any but the most minimal regulations to protect the rights of individuals and private enterprise and the smallest possible social safety net are seen as burdening us with wasteful taxation and a bureaucracy that saps the resources and entrepreneurial spirit of the citizenry and undermines the values of work and family.
Variations on these competing visions of the role of government and the rights of individuals exist all along the political spectrum. Most of us hold a point of view that exists somewhere between the extremes, even if we do not consciously articulate it that way. We may grumble about paying taxes, but we generally support programs like veterans’ benefits, Social Security, and Medicare, along with public education, environmental protection, and some sort of social safety net for the poor, especially children. We are wary of both government interference with private initiative or personal belief and the excessive influence of special interests on the political system. Most of us would describe ourselves as “middle of the road”—liberal in some areas, conservative in others, moderate in most, neither exclusively pro- nor anti-government. We respect the unique power of government to meet certain social needs and acknowledge the need to limit its powers.
/> In times of profound and overwhelming social change like the present, however, extreme views hold out the appeal of simplicity. By ignoring the complexity of the forces that shape our personal and collective circumstances, they offer us scapegoats. Yet they fail to provide a viable pathway from the cold war to the global village.
At present, the extreme anti-government position is the noisiest one—or at least the one that gets the most attention from the media. There are few voices arguing for more government. Instead, the public debate is primarily between those who argue for much less government, period, and those who advocate a smaller, less bureaucratic, but still active government to meet the demands of the Information Age. Anti-government rhetoric appears to offer a vision of greater efficiency, self-reliance, and personal freedom. (For obvious reasons, it also usually enjoys greater financial backing and better-organized support.) Unfortunately, this rhetoric ignores what has historically been most valuable about our skepticism toward government—the emphasis it places on personal responsibility from all citizens. Instead, it argues against the excesses of government but not against those of the marketplace, where there is great power to disrupt the lives of workers, families, and communities. It even argues against the basic protections government extends to the well-being of individuals, families, and communities, without offering an alternative way of safeguarding them. In fact, its extreme case against government, often including intense personal attacks on government officials and political leaders, is designed not just to restrain government but to advance narrow religious, political, and economic agendas.
We must ask ourselves: Who benefits from the elimination of federal regulations that protect us from outbreaks of contaminated drinking water or cases of tainted meat? Who benefits from a decrease in federal pollution standards, or from the kind of massive deregulation that could allow companies to dump toxins into our nation’s oceans, rivers, and lakes? Certainly not our families or our children.
Despite the resurgence of anti-government extremism, it is becoming clear that most Americans do not favor a radical dismantling of government. Instead of rollback, they want real reform. And when a strong case can be made, they still favor government action, as they have demonstrated recently in their support for measures like the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Brady Bill, and the new Direct Student Loan program.
Moreover, our whole history proves that a debate of extremes does little to reform government or to help solve problems that people confront in their daily lives. The clearest example of this is in the public debate over the assistance government should—or should not—provide to children and families. In a 1991 pastoral letter, “Putting Children and Families First,” the United States Catholic Conference cautioned: “There has been an unfortunate, unnecessary, and unreal polarization in discussions of the best way to help families.” That polarization has garnered more sound bites than progress, presenting an incomplete and occasionally inaccurate picture of how families and children are affected by government actions. We’ve had more press coverage, for instance, about welfare benefits that affect nine million American children than about the dramatic expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is decreasing the taxes of lower-income working parents so that they and the more than twenty-five million children they are raising do not have to live in poverty.
This is but one example of the bottom-line truth about responsibility for the well-being of families and children: it is not an exclusively pro- or anti-government proposition. As the Catholic Conference noted:
The most important work to help our children is done quietly—in our homes and neighborhoods, our parishes and community organizations. No government can love a child and no policy can substitute for a family’s care, but clearly families can be helped or hurt in their irreplaceable roles. Government can either support or undermine families as they cope with the moral, social, and economic stresses of caring for children…. Some emphasize the primary role of moral values and personal responsibility, the sacrifices to be made and the personal behaviors to be avoided, but they often ignore or de-emphasize the broader forces which hurt families, e.g., the impact of economics, discrimination, and anti-family policies. Others emphasize the social and economic forces that undermine families and the responsibility of government to meet human needs, but they often neglect the importance of basic values and personal responsibility…. The undeniable fact is that our children’s future is shaped both by the values of their parents and the policies of our nation.
For the sake of our children, we ought to call an end to false debates between values and policies. Both personal and mutual responsibility are essential, and we should work to strengthen them at all levels of society. Let us admit that some government programs and personnel are efficient and effective, and others are not. Let us acknowledge that when it comes to the treatment of children, some individuals are evil, neglectful, or incompetent, but others are trying to do the best they can against daunting odds and deserve not our contempt but the help only we—through our government—can provide. Let us stop stereotyping government and individuals as absolute villains or absolute saviors, and recognize that each must be part of the solution. Let us use government, as we have in the past, to further the common good.
Our democracy has survived for more than two hundred years because at critical junctures a majority of the people and their representatives resisted the lure of extremism. Indeed, the founders wrote our Constitution in a way that permits us to be both principled and pragmatic in meeting the challenges of each new era. The willingness to compromise in the interest of maintaining stability enabled our nation to become not only a world power but also a pluralistic society promoting unprecedented tolerance for individual rights and freedoms.
Our strength, in other words, has rested in our determination to reject simplistic absolutes and to redefine and revitalize a productive middle ground, relinquishing outdated solutions and embracing new approaches. As President Lincoln said in his time, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
In our time, the revitalization of this middle ground rests in a vision of government as smaller and less bureaucratic, a partner to, rather than a replacement for, personal initiative in tackling many of our deepest problems. The idea is not to weaken government to the point of ineffectuality but to make it leaner and more supple in fulfilling its basic responsibilities: (1) to build a strong, globally competitive economy that grows the middle class and shrinks the underclass; (2) to bring the American people together around the shared values of opportunity for and responsibility from all, to support families at work and at home, and to build communities that fulfill their obligations to families, the environment, and those who need and deserve support; (3) to keep America the world’s strongest force for peace, freedom, democracy, and prosperity. The success of this vision can be seen in our recent progress on the economic front and declines in the rates of crime, welfare, poverty, and teen pregnancy, along with a reduction in government to its smallest size in thirty years.
The truth that guides all successful efforts to reinvent government is the recognition that government is not something outside us—something irrelevant or even alien to us—but is us. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that government has a responsibility not only to provide essential services but to bring individuals and communities together. In a democracy, government is not “them” but “us,” an endeavor that joins with volunteerism and the efforts of the private sector in sustaining our mutual obligations to our children, families, and communities.
Does this mean that we should overlook flaws and mistakes in government? Of course not. Criticism and public debate are vital to a democracy. They help us to weigh the costs of existing government services against the value of those services, and to consider the practical consequences of budget cuts or reforms
to the delivery of those services. Constructive criticism also acknowledges the relationship of one decision to another, rather than lumping them together indiscriminately or viewing each in isolation. But rhetoric that demonizes or dehumanizes individuals or institutions—sometimes baldly, sometimes under the guise of contributing to the public debate—shares none of these characteristics.
If you are confused about the difference, try applying the invective you hear leveled broadly at “government programs” directly to the children who are among their most important beneficiaries. Are the children sustained by government-subsidized day care or fed by government-supported school breakfasts and lunches a “threat to our economic freedom” or guilty of “waste, fraud, and abuse”? Do programs to immunize or educate them “sap their initiative”?
The real problem for families today is the many challenges they face in raising their children according to the values they hold. That is, in part, what this book is about: how we can act together as a village to strengthen families and enable them to obtain from outside institutions the assistance they need to raise strong children and to protect themselves from influences that threaten to undermine parental authority. But many of those who wave the banner of family values seem more intent on promoting an anti-government political agenda than sensibly considering the roles played by all our institutions, including government, business, child care, schools, charities, the media, and religion.
At the beginning of this book, I mentioned that experts on child development know much more today than they did thirty years ago about what children need to develop well, but that their research is not well known to the general public. The research also charts a steady decline in conditions required for healthy development of all our children—not only the poor and minorities—about which the public deserves better information.
It Takes a Village Page 27