Sometimes we laugh about committees; we joke that if the horse had been designed by a committee, it’d look like the camel. We tend to think the horse is soooo much nicer to look at or live with.
People who lived in places where the camel was the native species did not share this feeling. The law of ancient Israel actually contained a rule that the king was not to keep horses. The idea was that donkeys were for riding around the farm, oxen were for heavy work, camels were for crossing the desert, and horses were just for show! Ancient Israelites had seen foreign warlords ride their horses into battle, where the idea was to kill someone else’s horse and then try to get your own horse to trample him before somebody killed your horse, and they saw how cruel and wasteful this was and they wanted no part of it. They had no such problems with the camel. Hebrew and Arabic words come in families, and the word for "camel" is part of the same family with words for “perfect” and “beautiful” and “just right for its intended purpose.” The camel was not meant to be a horse. It’s just right for its intended purpose.
Similarly, our Bill of Rights, which was the product of a lot of intensive bickering by a committee, is just right for its intended purpose. No single person could have got all those ten important points in there, right at the beginning. Nobody’s ever just written a Bill of Rights all by perself.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, was not exactly a normal man. His going down with polio as an adult, and then recovering as an adult, was like a metaphor for his character.
Without vaccinations or even earlier exposure, most adults just build up enough resistance that they don’t go down with polio like that. Adults can be immune carriers of polio but they rarely show recognizable symptoms of the disease. So FDR lacked something that most people have.
Then again, most people who have polio at any age are disabled by it for a long time. They have to work to be able to walk again. Adults who notice that they have polio usually die. FDR forced himself through the exercises and stood up and walked and worked for more than fifteen years. So he also had something that most people lack.
Among the other things he had was an oversized ego, so oversized that he thought he could just sit down and write a new Bill of Rights. He seriously thought that, and talked about it in public. Among the things he lacked was any idea how impossible it was that his ideas could lead to what his “new bill of rights” claimed he wanted.
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
FDR also had four presidential terms. He was going into his last one when he read his “new bill of rights” on the radio in 1944. He wanted everybody to have, first and foremost, a useful and remunerative job.
That is one of the things a person needs to have in order to be a good citizen. We’ve tried just throwing money at people, instead. It’s like saying, “Nobody needs anything you can do, you’re useless, we hate you, but let it never be said that we didn’t give you the stuff you needed to survive. Not actual grocery money, you’d probably spend that the wrong way, you worthless useless bum, but we’ll give you some food. Well, yes, it is pretty nasty, but beggars can’t be choosers and since you didn’t earn the money to buy food you’d like, why should you expect better quality food than your dog? If anything we prefer the dog to you. Now, now, now, you don’t need soap to survive. You don’t need toilet paper to survive. We don’t actually want you having cash you might use to buy those things. But we can certainly give you plenty of food, even if half of it is rotten and the other half is zucchini. Well, if you had a freezer you could freeze the zucchini, anyway. You’re not expecting us to give you a freezer are you? Of all the nerve! Here we’ve been kind enough to GIVE you forty zucchini and you expect anybody to GIVE you a freezer as well!”
We are an overprivileged nation. You have to be horribly overprivileged to imagine that someone who does not own a freezer is going to think kind thoughts about anyone who dumps forty zucchini on their doorstep.
No. We cannot just feed adult human beings, and we need to stop trying. We need to integrate them into the community. They must have jobs. They must be able to earn the money to pay for what they choose to eat. If they’re going to be good citizens of a democratic nation they should be earning at least ten times as much as they spend on food. You don’t ever want anyone to feel that all their day’s work has earned is food. Work all day, choke down a little food, repeat—that’s not life in a democratic nation. If the body’s needs are going to be satisfied by a dinner that costs five or ten dollars, then the job needs to pay fifty or a hundred dollars a day, in order to count.
If the dinner costs only ten cents, then the person might feel satisfied by a job that pays a dollar a day. When FDR was born, a dollar was still an acceptable day’s wages because a dime would still buy an acceptable day’s food rations. Almost every American in FDR’s generation was able to earn that dollar a day. Once FDR’s policies got rolling for my generation, we see where we’ve got to. A lot of people who want to earn fifty or a hundred dollars a day are being denied that opportunity and being offered food handouts instead.
Data point: The longest this underpaid writer has just stopped buying food, because spending every dang penny on food is such a miserable substitute for a living, is seven weeks. So far. It would have made more of a statement if I'd starved, but I had a stockpile of caffeinated drinks and a not-a-lawn full of edible "weeds," and I felt perky while losing only flab.
We as a nation need to criminalize telling anyone “Well, we have food banks, we have food stamps.” Able-bodied people do not need food. They need JOBS. We have to break this fixation on feeding people. We don’t even know what they can digest, for pity’s sake. We need to replace “Oh, there’s a poor person! I’ll give person some food!” with “Please, Mr. or Ms. Poor Person, I need your help with this JOB that will pay more than the cost of another day’s food.” Just keep biting your lips together, a little bleeding won’t kill you, until you have that hundred dollars to offer the person for a JOB.
FDR also thought everyone had a right to raise and sell products. Get that—he didn’t do too well with policies that protected the right to raise and sell your own food, but at least he did recognize that it was a fundamental human right. One reason why this right is crucial is that, when people’s right to raise and sell food is not being interfered with, people who are “trying to help” can’t distract themselves from what is really needed, which is the JOB, with their crazy babbling about food.
Imagine a world where we still took that one seriously. “Let’s use tax dollars to build a lot of slums where nothing green can grow, tell poor people they have to live in the said slums, and give them a lot of food!” would be a proposition nobody could seriously make. “What is the matter with you? Poor people already have their kitchen gardens. Get back in here. Lie down. You need rest—and treatment.”
FDR actually thought that people, even poor people, had the right to achieve and enjoy good health. FDR happened to know a little about how good health is achieved. Not only he and his wife, but his macho celebrity relative, Theodore Roosevelt, had fought their way from a sickly sedentary life to an active and vigorous life. Before he started swaggering around the world "carrying a big stick," TR had been a mopey little nerdboy with asthma. That's how FDR knew that vigorous outdoor exercise was his ticket back to life after polio.
A few readers Out There, Grandma Bonnie Peters' contemporaries, may still remember the FDR era. This web site would love to hear from youall. What do you remember best about the early 1940s? Was it...the "Victory Gardens"? Toward the goal of financing the War, the Roosevelts urged everyone to raise as much of their own food as they could. The idea was that more good healthy American potatoes could be shipped out to feed the troops, but the Roosevelts knew that gardening would also build healthier young Americans. They even promoted efforts to get children from urban areas placed as summer boarders in rural homes, so poor little city children could get some healthy fresh air and outdoor exercise.
In his time FDR's writing his own Bill of Rights was controversial. Some thought that being in the White House too long had given him delusions of monarchy. In the 1940s most Americans thought that a man who had no farm to work on had better get himself into town and find a job, and if he didn't get a job, why, something was badly wrong with him and he probably belonged in jail. Why would any reasonable President bother his head about that, they wondered. Since when was it the federal government's business to find jobs for people? All the federal government had to do was fend off invading armies, coin money, and deliver the mail, and people would take care of everything else for themselves. People were proud of responsibility rather than afraid of it.
No matter how much the "Progressives" carried on about the situations where responsible individuals didn't make everything perfect, by some indicators people were better off then than now. Yes, people (even at this web site) can be heard to say that "progress has been made"...but they don't mean "People pay more taxes now," or "Federal regulations are more complicated now." They mean "Antibiotics and even antiviral treatments have been discovered," or "People have at least been educated to resist certain specific forms of prejudice, although even intelligent people fall into the Genetic Fallacy of Thinking," or "Rapid travel and communication are fun."
We could do better than insist that today's "Progressives" focus on working back toward FDR's original attempt to rewrite the Bill of Rights, ludicrous piece of presumption that it was. One person can't write a Bill of Rights but FDR did know more about what can actually help disadvantaged people, e.g. people with major disabilities, than today's Progs seem to know.
No comments:
Post a Comment