How to Tell a Fish It is Wet

In my Master of Social Work studies, I was required to take a class on policy. I was not enthused because I viewed policy as boring. How wrong I was. I soon realized we all swim in a sea of policies making our lives easier or harder, wealthier or poorer. Policies express our values. From paved roads to public toilets, from tax codes to building codes, from education to economics, from abortion to Jim Crow, from definitions of marriage to unpaid maternity leave, there are tens of thousands of policies impacting and shaping our daily lives. Every law  or regulation implements a policy. We are all in the sea, and we are all soaking wet. Those policies get put into place by politicians and politics is how we select them. So, when people tell me they are not interested in politics, I know they are, as I used to be, a fish who has no idea what it means to be wet; failing to recognize the sea in which we swim. Politics determines policy and we should care about that as much as a fish cares about the quality of the water in which it lives.  

Around this same time, I came across a quote by one of the most conservative Presidents of the 20^th Century, Calvin Coolidge:

“When you live in a democracy, you are a politician whether you wish to be or not.”

By voice and vote we all influence policy, but the opposite of that is also true. When we silence our voices or ignore our votes, we also influence policy. The difference is that by the first means we do it intentionally while by the latter, we do it by default. Either way, policies are added or subtracted from the sea in which we all swim; we all get wet. Failing to be “political” means I have ceded all my influence to others and must live with what they choose to give me. It also means I fail my democracy.

While policy bores us, politics annoys us and we love to hate politicians who run “the Government”. And this is not accidental. From at least the time of Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural pronouncement that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” we have been fed a steady diet of how bad government and politicians are. We have been taught the government should get out of the way of the market and let the market rule. We have been made cynical about government and this led us to today, what many Gen-X and Millennials refer to as “end stage capitalism.” As anti-tax warrior Grover Norquist put it, the plan is to make government so small you can drown it in the bathtub.

Here’s the problem. We’re the government. We’re the politicians. We’re the ones called to pay attention, educate ourselves on the issues, and vote accordingly. Our learned cynicism has diminished our voices in the face of market forces that care nothing about societal good. The markets will not save us, nor do they plan to give us a better society. Indeed, they are told their ethical obligation is to maximize profits even over societal good. (Read an excellent blog on this here.) One of the most expensive crimes in the nation is wage theft where businesses fail to pay their employees for worked hours. This theft amounts to $8 billion dollars stolen annually from workers. If corporations are people, many are sociopaths.

While we held politicians in contempt, failed to vote, and proudly proclaimed our disinterest in “politics”, powerful monied interests simultaneously found ways to absorb the vast majority of the wealth and fix the laws so that what was once considered blatant corruption is not only legal, it is the general practice of the day. When the Supreme Court—packed with conservative judges placed there by “trickle-down” politicians—ruled that money was free speech, they silenced us by taking away the volume of our voice. It now takes millions of us to match a single billionaire. We are outshouted by the wealthy. For example, 89% of Americans favor universal background checks on gun purchases, but so far the NRA and other gun manufacturing lobbyists have  successfully stifled any legislation to this end by “donations” in black money. Why doesn’t a bankruptcy clear student loans? Because banks didn’t like it. As Congress became less responsive to us, our cynicism about government grew. Enough.  

What to do? Dismiss your cynicism about government. The government is not the problem because the government is us. But it will only work for us when we invest ourselves and demand those we elect represent us. Reclaim your voice and your vote. It will not be easy. The monied interests have deeply embedded themselves in our psyche, and in electoral and legislative processes, i.e. in our government. They may say they hate it, but they sure know how to use it. They have diminished our power and our voice. Right now, the tools we have are our bodies, our voices, and our votes. They will fight with every trick, every personal attack, every backroom arm-twist they can muster to keep us cynical, silent and passive. Why is voter suppression rampant? Because your vote matters. Why are peaceful protesters met with violence? Because your bodies and your voices matter. Don’t badmouth the government; be the government. Insist your family and friends be the government, work to change the election laws and legislative processes that have crippled our voices and suppressed our votes.

The most cruel way to teach a fish it is wet is to leave it high and dry. We are nearly there. That is the brutal lesson we are forcibly learning now from our oligarchy bought-out Congressional and state legislatures. It’s past time to rouse ourselves back into the polluted waters of our political processes and demand the policies that will make the swamp clean again.  It will never be perfect, but it doesn’t have to be poisonous.

May we heal the nation. AB