The Liberaltarian Jackalope: The liberal-libertarian rapprochement is probably dead on arrival. – Reason Magazine.

And while I didn’t find the conclusions that unexpected, I was struck by the comments (which were, frankly, more interesting than the essay itself) and came to a realization from reading them: 21st century libertarians are pie-in-the-sky optimists, conservatives are cynical pessimists, and liberals are, surprise surprise, the realists in the bunch.

Libertarians can wax poetic about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ and how if only individuals acted in their own true self interest then we’d build a utopia, but the reality is that this might work if we each lived on our own little singular island, alone in the world completely, but in a society it’s DOA. I’ve only lived in one other country besides the US, Mexico. Mexico has the laissez faire economics and political system that libertarians love. They have very little governmental interference in any aspect of the individual’s life. This means, of course, that if you’re poor, you have unsafe water, unpaved roads, and no electricity. It also means that if you get trampled by a bull at the rodeo no ambulance will come to take you to the hospital and if a rabid dog bites you, tough luck. It means that banks can charge whatever interest they want on a loan (and they can change the interest rate half way through the loan, if they want) and phone companies can charge outrageous rates, cancel your service, change your bill’s due date, whatever, without government interference. And it means if you get kidnapped by narcos you’re probably going to die.

The idea that individuals serving their own best interest with little government involvement will lead to less problems is rather absurd, if we use Mexico as an example. Of course, the conservative idea that individuals are inherently bad and need to be socially controlled is equally absurd. They believe in law and order above all else, and have a truly wacky idea of government as some sort of schizophrenic presence that should both protect us from ‘the gays,’ lay a heavy law enforcement hand on society (in a Christian glove), and keep out of our wallets come tax time and out of our corporate balance sheets all the time. It’s completely hypocritical, which is why their so-called ‘philosophy’ is imploding in Rush Limbaugh’s vocal chords.

Liberalism, on the other hand, sees the whole situation as a complex mess that demands a range of approaches and solutions. Not all liberals are alike, just as conservatives and libertarians are motley bunches themselves. But I’m a liberal because I see the world in shades of gray, not in stark whites or blacks. As such, I see a range of solutions to problems and see that some of them won’t be solved in my lifetime, but will demand attention for generations. Fortunately, I’m not alone in this. It’s a relief, isn’t it?

Pretty much sums it up, though I’d add that it’s hard to be disappointed when you know what you’re getting. Obama’s rhetoric was always sweeping but rarely progressive. He’s guaranteed a certain amount of continuation of Bush’s policies by retaining either members of the past administration or like-minded folks like Larry Summers and Geithner. Sure, we all hoped he was just talking that ‘centrist’ crap to get elected and that once he was in office he’d behave as a progressive and actually bring us real, genuine change. But he was being flown to those campaign speeches in ADM’s corporate jet. So who else was on board, do you think?

Babye!

Beyond the beauty of Obama’s speech was seeing that helicopter take off with “He-who-must-not-be-named.” That was truly beautiful.

Overall, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. And overwhelmingly pleased that we’ve come this far.

But perhaps it has been those very catastrophes that has turned me into a realist, rather than merely a cynic, and it is through these clear, sharp realistic lenses that I find such distaste in our president-elect’s call for national service.

I take issue with the idea of a ‘new era of responsibility’ for a myriad of reasons, the most important one being that we are already a nation of volunteers, so the ‘call’ seems redundant and, frankly, patronizing. But I particularly take issue with Obama’s recent statement: “Government can only do so much….If we’re waiting for someone else to do something, it never gets done.” There are things only government can do, and it was those very things, abandoned as they were by Bush’s incompetence and immorality, that have led to our catastrophic failures of the past eight years.

While my husband was fighting in Afghanistan with inadequate supplies, equipment, and incompetent leadership, I saw the city where we’d lived for the past four years drown in a flood of governmental irresponsibility. Was it a lack of individual sacrifice, a lack of ‘service’ that caused the levees to collapse? Was it a lack of ‘service’ that left literally thousands stranded on their rooftops and in so-called ‘shelters of last resort’ without clean water or food? Was it our lack of ‘service’ that led to the deaths of thousands in the floodwaters and in the difficult months afterwards in exile? Was it our lack of ‘service’ and ‘responsibility’ that further endangered my husband’s life in the mountains of the Hindu Kush along the Pakistan border, as he and his men traveled along al Qaeda’s mountain trails in unarmored Ford Ranger pick-ups with no radios, rationed bullets, and few other supplies?

No. Our individual service, even our collective, ‘community’ service, would have done nothing to prevent or help these disasters. What we needed was competent, responsible government.

In fact, volunteers did all that they could do to make up for this lack of governmental responsibility. They packed boxes full of thoughtful, rather useless, goodies for soldiers. They sent money and clothes for Katrina relief efforts. And, of course, they gave their time to help, so much so that many of the umbrella organizations doing the support had more volunteers than they had jobs for.

Immediately after Katrina, I went to Houston to volunteer with the Red Cross. There were thousands upon thousands of eager volunteers desperate to make up for the failures of government. We cleaned and disinfected cots. We helped Katrina survivors find their relatives and see their flooded neighborhoods on Google Earth. We pointed them to the pathetic, tiny FEMA office and we handed out gift cards from Target. But this was not enough.

Because of our government’s incredible malfeasance during the immediate days after the flood, families were divided up and separated during the evacuations, with some members sent to North Dakota, others to Dallas, and still others to Boston or Chicago or Atlanta, etc. Some family members were mentally or physically disabled or ill. Some were children (yes, children were separated from their parents, incredibly) and others elderly. They were separated from their families, sometimes for the first time, and were left to try to find them using a jumbled group of lists cobbled together from a dozen organizations.

It was a nightmare. Lists were being kept by local branches of the Red Cross as well as by the International Committee. There were lists from FEMA, from church groups. Two weeks after the storm, they were trying to put the lists together in an on-line database so people could find each other since there were still tens of thousands who were lost, including hundreds of children separated from their parents.

During all of this, the Red Cross and other service organizations had more volunteers than they could use. I met volunteers who had driven down with trucks full of supplies from Minnesota and Kansas. I met volunteers from San Francisco, Chicago, and NYC, and even a bunch of scientologists from LA who were there to ‘minister’ to the evacuees. To keep volunteers feeling useful, the Red Cross offered certification programs. It was a beautiful demonstration of our community’s desire and willingness to help our neighbors, but it was also a clear demonstration of what our community needed most: competent government to do the job.

I had a similar experience when, months later, I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans. S was back from the war and was giving a talk at Tulane over my birthday weekend in February, 2006. I decided the best way to spend my birthday would be to volunteer with Habitat, so I signed up.

Overwhelmed with volunteers and Americorps workers, the Habitat headquarters in St. Bernard was a well-intentioned, but horribly disorganized, mess. There was the warehouse room filled with donated clothes that required an army of volunteers to sort through. Who were these clothes going to? They were going to be recycled once again back into the donation system, because there was no need in St. Bernard, which at the time was still largely abandoned. Still, there were hundreds of volunteers working their way through tons and tons of clothes, putting them in their appropriate boxes, and getting to feel a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment from ‘helping out.’

There were the rooms of Habitat supplies that were being ‘reorganized,’ another way to keep the volunteers busy. They were literally moving things from one side of the room to the other, and from what I gathered from the Americorps workers I was teamed with, this was not the first time this ‘reorganization’ had been done. And then there was the job I was assigned (or ‘given’, as if it were a gift to me, which of course is the entire conceit): to retrieve shelves from a Habitat site in the upper 9th ward to bring back to the headquarters to use in the ‘reorganization’. I was with a group of young men, all of whom were full-time volunteers with either Habitat or Americorps, and most had been with the organization for several months or longer. They were bored. They were tired. They were cynical. They were incredibly unmotivated and I couldn’t blame them. We spent the entire morning waiting for people in the rain, then loaded a handful of crappy shelves onto an open trailer and drove them back to the headquarters. This took four hours but it easily could have taken the entire day. At one point I took charge and got the shelves onto the trailer — it seemed if someone didn’t, the young men would have been willing to wait around all day and get absolutely nothing done. When I talked to one Americorps worker, a young guy right out of college who wants to get into politics, he told me this was how it had been every single day since he’d arrived in New Orleans several months earlier. In between these days of boredom and uselessness, he told me, there were outbreaks of disease and food poisoning at the dank headquarters, and random thefts (including his work boots from underneath his bed). I suppose there must have been a few brief moments of actual, rewarding accomplishment, though no one told me about them.

I left after lunch. It was clear they had absolutely nothing for me to do, and I didn’t really need the ‘gift’ of feeling ‘good’ about my service, even on my birthday. Plus I suspect they would have gotten a lot more done if a few hundred volunteers had joined me in my exodus from the headquarters that afternoon. There were just too many of us and no amount of us could make up for the lack of governmental responsibility and action.

Before we moved to New Orleans, I ran a non-profit organization in Chicago. The truth is that most non-profits do not have the staff or infrastructure to deal with volunteers. Volunteers are often no different than low-level interns (or ‘service-learners’, that rather dreadful combination that’s being peddled at quality universities across the country,  including Michelle Obama’s program, “Public Allies,” at the University of Chicago). They require an incredible amount of supervision, and especially for smaller organizations (or really large ones with young staff), they require an infrastructure specifically designed to integrate volunteers into the organization’s operations.

This sort of volunteer-management infrastructure requires staff itself and, of course, money. From my experience in the non-profit world, we’re most often lacking in both.

I remember working with ‘service learner’ interns at the organization in Chicago, some of whom came to us through Michelle Obama’s program at U of C. The program is intended to benefit the students first and foremost, which I’m quite certain it does. But to the organizations who are paired with the students, the relationship is sometimes more complicated. We found it to be both a blessing and a curse to have student learners in our office. While it meant a little extra cash for our budget, it also meant we lost precious staff hours. The interns required a lot of supervision. A lot. I had a hard time seeing the net benefit to us, given how many staff hours had to be spent on helping and monitoring our student ‘service learning’ workers.

One day we had a group of service-learners and their professor come to meet some of the participants in our writing groups. The professor talked about the principles behind service learning and the benefits to ‘the community.’ After the professor was done talking, one of the writers, Larry, asked a question: who exactly was doing the serving and who was doing the learning? It seemed to him that the students were being served rather than serving, so he couldn’t see where the benefit was to ‘the community’. His point left the professor dumb-founded and, surprise, surprise, we didn’t hear from them when they were looking for organizations to ‘service.’

This is the basic problem with the idea of a ‘call to service’. Most often we are looking to serve our own interests (feeling good about what we’re doing, etc etc) and don’t ask ‘the community’ what they need. If we did, often the answer would be better government and more resources rather than more volunteers. The same can be said for many non-profits. While some rely heavily on volunteers (and manage them effectively), many need, instead, more financial resources to hire and pay professional staff rather than more volunteers to monitor.

But beyond these domestic examples, I think the best example I’ve seen that argues against Obama’s statement is in Mexico. My husband is an archaeologist and he works in a Zapotec village in south central Mexico. Like other traditional Mexican communities, the village has a built-in community service component to civic life. It is not optional, though there are no written laws requiring service. It is embedded in the culture and it is based on an inherent obligation to one’s community. There are literally loudspeaker-calls for community service on certain days of the year, when every member of the community must come out to help with a local project. Additionally, members rotate in their duties of overseeing the management of the land and local government, and even hosting the annual feria, a duty that falls financially on a different man each year, the designated mayordomo. There is no distinction between the individual and the community when it comes to service and responsibility. Individual, communal responsibility and service are inherent in the workings of the village.

And yet they have dirt roads that easily flood, they have no plumbing or clean drinking water, they have no local health clinic or schools beyond elementary, and they are constantly struggling to retain their younger residents who leave, out of economic necessity, for the US. How can this be with so much community service, so much community involvement? Of course, the answer is rather obvious: no amount of community service and individual responsibility can give the village what they need. They need competent, compassionate government.

So do we. We have compassionate individuals who are willing to do what they are asked to do. But we do not have a government capable of doing what it must do.

This is not to say that we should stop serving our communities and stop volunteering. The whole process of leaving our homes and entering into our larger community, to ‘commune’ with our neighbors and see how much the same we all are, is beautiful. But it’s also not a bad idea to ask our neighbors what they need rather than giving them what we’d like to give. Nor is it a bad idea to demand our government do what it must do, namely all of the things our community of individuals is incapable of doing on its own.

Let’s call on Obama to give us what we most need. In exchange for this national day of service, how about a government capable and willing to govern? How about a government that fulfills its mission to serve the people of our large, kaleidoscopic community. Now that would be something even this cynic/realist could believe in.

Op-Ed Columnist – Bleeding Heart Tightwads – NYTimes.com.

You can read comments on the column at Kristof’s blog.

I’m with many of the commenters who point out that liberals expect government to do much of what conservatives claim private organizations can and should do. I live in New Orleans. No amount of giving from conservatives and liberals made up for the complete lack of governmental support (and competence) in the days and months after Katrina struck. There are some things government must do. In order for government to be able to do what it must do, it must be staffed with competent people who believe in government (and who don’t wish to drown it in the bathtub), and it must have the funds to do it. We need a tax base that looks toward the common, collective good rather than for loop holes to protect personal wealth.

In New Orleans we have private security firms patrolling neighborhoods and we even have a private road. I was raised in Chicago where such things would have been unheard of. We had no signs there saying ‘This neighborhood patrolled by off-duty Chicago Police’ because the Chicago Police actually patrolled the neighborhood, gasp, on duty. But then, police officers in Chicago are paid a living wage.

This issue became a talking point during the election and it raised my ire then just as it does now. Yes, conservatives care so much for their communities. That’s why they support illegal, unjustified wars that send their neighbors (like my husband) to war. That’s why they support underfunding public schools, public health (including veterans health care — let’s not forget the ultra-giver McCain received a D rating from IAVA), public works, and have tried desperately to privatize everything, including social security.

Sorry, but I’ll take a ’stingy’ liberal over a ‘generous’ conservative any day. We’ve seen what their version of generosity reaps. What a choice!

Editorial – The Torture Report – NYTimes.com.