Let’s add politics fatigue to covid fatigue.
Once we had buffers – family, community, our traditions. Today simple humanity seems warped by everything political. Masks, for one example.
Religion for another. The medieval church, you will recall, once tried and failed to capture human nature and human souls. The church strongly resisted translation of the Bible into English, which would make it the common property of the common people, no longer a special work to be interpreted by special churchmen.
Our political parties now use the same tactic, a father-knows-best approach to living. Citizens are identified as children to be treated that way. The parties are close to the mark – not because we are all childlike, but among us are pockets of foolishness and the infantile; government has become so all-encompassing that legislators are like parents everywhere around us, hovering, telling us what to do and how we should live – and Twitter-shaming us when we don’t do it.
These parents have no remedies or corrections, only lectures and sanctions.
When this nation was founded, it was against a backdrop of faith, of good years for generations to come. Government was to be perfect, virtue was to prevail, and we would not only pursue happiness, we would actually be happy.
Today’s so-called leaders talk on and on, and it is hard to imagine that they are talking about us, about our lives. Their language is statistical and abstract, they no longer have ideas; they have techniques and strategies. They have scenarios.
The end of it is that politics is the most frustrating game in town. It is no longer possible to believe that an individual – including the president of the United States – can beat the system, a system that has become too unwieldy to play with much hope of winning.
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Crisis fatigue
A legislator sails into town for a good will tour, often arranged to commend a project or a business for its valor, its efficiency and responsibility, for enduring in a nasty economic climate.
We ask at some point why Washington can’t follow the same example. The reply usually begins with a litany on the federal structure, its bulk, its political landscape, its codes and strictures, the shrill chorus of cause lobbies, the choking tides of cyber-world, its countless and ruinous information silos.
Governing in Washington and, to some extent, Topeka, has become gang warfare, its focus on scoring points against “the other side.” Our visiting legislator insists the battle hasn’t stained his purity. The other 534 members of the House and Senate are saying the same in other places to their own constituents. This is why Washington remains fog-bound.
Example: Forty-odd years ago this nation was confronted by an energy crisis – now a climate crisis – which seemed to demand immediate congressional action.
Congress went on vacation.
The lawmakers came back in session and continued to look the other way.
This particular problem, among others, did not go away, it grew as Congress continued in defaulting its responsibility.
We are now learning how serious this congressional failure has become; wildfires incinerate the western landscapes, storms batter the coastal regions and weather patterns go sideways over the central plains.
For now, we can recognize:
1. The old shortages, particularly in heating oil and mass transit, have subsided in the face of transition to alternate and sustainable energy.
2. How to operate over the long pull has been revised, from a fear that oil imports would be cut off to a worry that an oil glut and $2 gasoline hardly inspire us to look beyond fossil fuels for our energy needs.
3. We’ve never had a plan to confront the crisis, an embarrassing 40-year legacy of neglect as other nations, especially Europe and China, move ahead at full speed.
We should provide incentives for alternate power sources, including solar, wind, and geothermal. We should seek green alternatives with the same intensity that we once put into oil exploration.
It’s been four decades since the alarms sounded for a second Arab oil embargo. About all Congress has done since is to argue about a windfall tax on oil profits and fiddle around with gasohol. It’s not much of a record.
The Trump administration treats the Arabs as beneficent, wealthy uncles and surveys the federal wilderness for the next oil patch. More fires will burn, more storms will happen, more farms will go dry.
Then we can wait for Congress to go on vacation, and for members to tour the hinterlands. We can anticipate their dramatic chronicles of how difficult and ominous things have become in Washington.
Is that it, after 40 years?
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