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I found the hard right Fox News and the hard left MSNBC to be the most compelling stations. MSNBC has a series of promotional videos that I rather enjoy. One features Lawrence O’Donnell talking about the G.I. Bill. [I had hoped to provide a link to the video but it doesn’t appear to be online anywhere.] O’Donnell states that the percentage of college graduates in the country before the G.I. Bill was just 6%. He then states that the G.I. Bill pushed that up to 20%. He said that it allowed his father to go to college and receive a good education so that his father could then put his five kids through college. O’Donnell ends the promo saying that “the critics called it ‘welfare’.”
This video really strikes at the heart of one of the philosophical divides in our country. Should the federal government provide things to its citizens in an attempt to improve their lives, strengthen the country and make a better world or should the federal government stay out of things and hope that the private sector and individual states make the correct choices to accomplish that end, to the best of their ability?
Right-wing thinkers would say that the federal government should stay out of everything that The Constitution doesn’t specifically grant it the power to do. I certainly understand that and agree with the sentiment. But my more contemplative answer would be that if the government can do something to improve the lives of people then--in some cases--it should. Building our highway system and great public works projects like the Hoover Dam are good examples. These are things that have been enormously beneficial for the country and could not have been done by private businesses because the scope was too great and/or the costs were too high, with no real way to garner a profit from the giant expenditure.
And this brings me back to Lawrence O’Donnell’s promo. Would we have been able to become the world’s biggest military super power without a healthy stock of college graduates in our country to build our weapons systems? Would we have been able to build a nation with the greatest infrastructure in the world? Would we have been able to beat the Russians to the moon? Think of all the amazing technologies and advances that were made because of that one goal. Would our country have the reputation and prestige had we not established ourselves as the world’s greatest and most dominant nation? Were it not for government investment, we would not have the internet as we know it today. The gadgets you love and depend on (e.g. iPhone, iPad, GPS, etc.) would certainly not exist.
What innovations for tomorrow are being cultivated by the federal government today? What inventions of tomorrow will spring from those investments? New gadgets, cures for diseases, better ways to educate, better and more efficient ways to communicate, better and more efficient energy sources? Certainly the government can run amok and create disastrous programs or programs that in time go far beyond the scope and cost of what was initially proposed and agreed to. This is why citizens need to be involved and informed so that we can provide the proper oversight.
So the politics of our country is not, and should not be, an argument about which side is going to “destroy our nation” and which side will save it. It should be a civil discussion about finding the correct balance of harnessing the power of our amazing country and utilizing our federal government to bring about beneficial changes to society without creating a government that is too vast or over-reaching. That’s it. Once we recognize this, fixing the problems of our country will be much simpler.
~R. Charan Pagan
information systems technologist, musician, writer, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA 90017
http://www.reclaimingourbirthright.blogspot.com/
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