In the craziness of the present moment, I am reminded of one of the most underrated movies of all time-Crazy Heart. A song from the movie, “Fallin’ & Flyin’” keeps coming to mind. I see the glee some people have at seeing the US government changed or the amazement that the president seems to get away with unprecedented moves. This all reminds me of the chorus and verse from the song that goes:
Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’/For a little while/Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’/For a little while
You never see it comin’ till its gone/It all happens for a reason /Even when its wrong/Especially when its wrong
We don’t know what the future holds. There is no way to know what good, evil, or change will come from all of this. Yet, just because you think you are flying or someone is soaring, they may actually be falling. Worse yet, they may land on us.
The biggest problem of the government is that it’s in the harm reduction business. What the federal government does best is reduce the harms of living in a complex society and world. We don’t really appreciate what makes the government great because it’s hard to appreciate the absence of great harm, disaster, or calamity. When diplomats avert a war, when bad actors think twice because of the might of the US military, when social service programs help the marginalized, when the law makes the world a little fairer, we don’t see it. Or we feel entitled to the benefits that stream from the government functioning, not acknowledging the hard work people are putting in to create those benefits. It’s easy to see where we fail as a society. Harder to celebrate that things are not as bad as they could be.
When you blow everything up, we may not see the harms right away. We won’t realize we are missing the benefits of research programs, if started now, that could change the world in ten years. Hard to say when preparing for a disaster will pay off, but when there is a disaster, you will be glad you tried. Soft power makes the world a better place, but it’s not glamorous or glitzy. Easy to attack. We will miss it if we could understand the good it does.
It’s easy to attack complicated systems. You can always identify failure points. Our world on this side of the eschatological divide will never be what we dream it could be. Harm reduction is arduous work. The end result always leaves something to be desired. But it takes a certain level of arrogance to destroy things. Have us metaphorically leap into the unknown. Claim we are flying when we are really falling. I lament what happens after a little while.
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