Editor’s note: This commentary is by Tom Fels, an independent curator and writer and author, most recently of “Buying the Farm: Peace and war on a sixties commune,” (UMass Press, 2012). He lives in North Bennington.
[I]t’s not just those crazed Trump supporters who seem inured to his wild and unpredictable slurs, or the wild-eyed followers of the sainted Bernie Sanders whose righteousness sometimes blinds them to other obvious truths. These, to some extent, we can understand, if not always endorse.
No, there is another important segment of the population who are angry at the current state of affairs. We call them citizens: Americans of no particular party, with no axe to grind, no concocted enemies, no recondite points to prove. They might be taxpayers, the productively employed, teachers, pensioners, families shepherding their savings for a later day, parents, students, artists, small businessmen and -women, library board members, mechanics, coaches, instructors – the list is as long as the political center is large.
What they are wondering is: How, in a country of such great resources, human and natural, could our roads and bridges be in such disrepair, our health system be in need of major overhaul, education perennially underfunded? Why do our water, air and lifespan often fall short of healthy norms, our wages or salaries prove inadequate, our businesses move offshore? Why is politics so closely tied to money, income disparities so highly pronounced, the wealthy unwilling to direct profits to the very resources and markets on which they depend? Why do we pay high salaries to hundreds of people in Washington, state capitals and other centers of government who seem content to do almost nothing of value?
People need to get involved. Vote. Speak out. Stick with your beliefs; help make them happen. Join boards, or hold them to their missions.
Inadequate schools, risky health conditions, poor wages, governments at all levels unable to manage projects and resources, businesses too focused on themselves to be concerned with their customers – these sorts of things make people angry.
The question they ask, which has cumulatively evolved over the past era – the late 20th and early 21st century – is: How did we go from a prosperous, productive, healthy, relatively happy society to one in which the mood has soured, resources are perpetually scarce, and public responsibility and imagination are in short supply? Who, they wonder, has been responsible for all this, and of course, what is to be done?
The place to look for answers, logically, is at the source of these problems. Boards, other governing entities and their leaders seem, over a long period of time, to have shelved long-term interests in favor of others less durable: Band-aids have been applied when, instead, surgery might better have been recommended. In business, a trail of tears among workers and consumers is the result of practices devoted to short-sighted gain. Have businesses not noticed that customers are the source of their income, not to mention the guardians of reputation, brand and other key commercial assets? We’ve found that urban renewal was not really that at all, and that emptying our mental health facilities has simply put the problems they were meant to deal with back on the street, where they are not solved, and through which others are now endangered. In the face of mass killings and wanton terrorism guns continue to proliferate.
What sorts of decisions do these represent? Not those of a healthy society, I would submit. Of course, democracy is a messy business, but to put our chosen system back on track, I suspect the answer is the one that Bernie has been hawking with considerable success: People need to get involved. Vote. Speak out. Stick with your beliefs; help make them happen. Join boards, or hold them to their missions. There is a lot that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gets wrong, but his admonition to “stand and speak, and vote your conscience” shows that there is indeed a way on which we can all agree to tilt the world toward a better path.
