This is tough stuff

This has been a really hard week. Work is obviously part of it, but I think the disaster and how it has been discussed has really gotten to me. Like Bootleg Blogger, I think I believe in and trust a certain social safety net. Watching the Republicans gut it and then point fingers dismays me. It is horrifying. And it is horrifying because this is the ultimate outcome of a policy driven by Grover Norquist's sick joke about "drowning the government in a bathtub." Government has been the whipping boy for conservatives--and religious conservatives have jumped on the bandwagon. And those of us who dissent are referred to as communists or socialists. Why?

Government is that social contract where people get together and decide to create a livable society. Codify their laws and determine how to live in a relative degree of harmony with each other. It isn't perfect and it isn't the solution to everything, but the absence of government is, well, living in caves. We developed government over the years to work together. Yes, governments have been used to oppress people. But so have churches. You don't hear me getting rid of churches.

I was thinking of that today when I heard James Dobson's self-congratulatory "look at how well we Christians are doing" speech on the hurricane (btw, he offers a Christian perspective on the storm for his listeners, because as he mentioned, that differs from what you will hear on the news.) What a giant braying ass. Not that churches aren't doing great work in this disaster, and not that churches don't do great work every day. But so do other organizations and so do people who aren't Christians. We need churches and other civic organizations.

But we also need government. We are supposed to be "a" people. And when the patriotic idiots are blathering, they warn us to be together. That we all have to unite behind the Prez. Yet when it is time to pay taxes for roads or levees or for an agency to protect us from disaster--it is everyone for themselves.

We don't need to love government. But hating it is stupid. And indefensible. And needs to be stopped. We need to, as kbonline said in my comments, speak the truth with integrity. We can do better. But it won't be by turning over our society to chaos.