Our more-rare-than-usual-these-days Sunday Night Family Dinner last night was pretty great. We were only missing Joanne, who lives in San Diego. It was a birthday edition, celebrating Jill's thirty-somethingth (a week late because she was in Hawai'i with her friend Martha for her actual birthday, poor thing!)
The adults nibbled lobster cakes (honestly my mother can make anything) and toasted with a gifted bottle of sparkling wine. The men were happy because the Sharks were on (and won!) The little cousins ran around eating chips and playing hide-and-seek, with grins as wide as their faces just to be with each other. Dinner was roasted cauliflower, grilled steaks and caesar salad. Mmmmmmmm.
And then.
Somehow (can never remember how exactly it happens when it does) the conversation dipped into to the much avoided land of politics. Now, in the microcosm of our family, we have:
a former teacher now working as a reading specialist in the public school system,
a small business owner & VP,
a speech therapist at a county hospital,
a retired RN,
a software engineer
and me - the stay-at-home-mom.
So, I guess I am the token bleeding heart liberal in the group - but I really don't like to argue and I really really don't like being written off as clueless. So I listened & asked questions. It has taken me a while, but I have found that it's way better than trying to explain or defend my thoughts on pretty much anything political. I am happy to report that it stayed civil last night. That might be a first; not that I'm eager to do it again any time soon!
The conversation ran the gamut last night. Vaccines, unemployment laws, taxes, government spending, healthcare, drug addiction, homelessness, even a momentary blip about abortion! Yeeeeeee-ikes. I used to simply bristle and shake my head at some of the seemingly overly harsh and callous comments I would hear, but now I've become a bit obsessed with trying to understand where they are coming from and why. What I'm finding is like everyone, their views come from what they see. And what they see are the sad, corrupt and hopeless cases on a frequent basis.
wasteful spending:
-insanely expensive medical equipment that grows dust in the hospital basement because there is literally only one person trained to use it
-a predictable annual rush of Parks Departments to purchase expensive materials with government funds because if they don't, they lose it and won't be able to apply for more next year
unemployment conundrum:
- the man who says he can't/won't start a job until after he gets his next government check even though he'd make triple that if he accepted and started right away
-the job applicant covered in tattoos - including teardrops around the eyes
the ramifications of drugs:
- the little boy who can't sit still or focus because he was born addicted to meth and has never been able to assimilate to the structure of school
- the man racking up more than $10K daily for months on end in the burn unit after setting himself on fire while high on meth
And on and on it goes...My head spins.
Why do government funds have to be spent in their entirety? Why can't any leftover money just be banked?
How
can unemployment laws be cleaned up so that people are motivated to get
back into the workforce instead of relying on government checks?
How can we break the cycle of poverty (drug addiction, homelessness, unintended pregnancies, welfare dependency, etc.)
How can we fix our education system?
What I kept coming back to last night was "so, what are the answers?"
Actually, not just "what are the answers?" but "who is supposed to be figuring them out?"
The government? Clearly that's not working. And what does that even mean? WE ARE the government.
I think it means that we must pick our pet projects and get our hands dirty. Really dirty.
I know I'm not the only one asking these questions. I know there are really good people out there working very hard in a very broken system to try to make a difference. I think I need to be one of them.
I don't know where to start.
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I think you start by talking about stuff that is important to you. Even if it's not important to other people. Because the more we talk about the stuff, the more focused our feelings get - or the more we learn that we want to learn more - OR that something we were sure we felt a certain way about isn't really how we feel any more.
And then someday, when we've had enough of whatever it is that bothers us, we'll find out when the city council meeting it, or the school board meeting, or the town hall meeting our elected official is holding is and we'll go. And probably listen a lot, and then go home and think about it some more. And then write a letter, or talk to some more people about what was discussed at the meeting, and maybe we'll decide to go back, or maybe we'll decide to google organizations that are working towards the things we'd like to see happen. And we'll go to a volunteer meeting, or we'll send a donation, and we'll receive email updates about what the organization advocates for.
There are millions of absolutely overwhelming issues, but, in many cases, there are people who have the same questions and puzzling thoughts as we do, and once we connect with those people, the synapses start firing and getting involved gets easier.
And you are NOT clueless, and anyone who wants to tell you that you are...well, I don't have nice words for them.
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