A friend of mine, who has years of experience as a contractor, thought that a local building project might not have been built correctly. He could more or less tell this by eyeballing it! Thus, he demanded the building records, maintained by the City, and after he got them, he found numerous flaws. An aggrieved outrage was his immediate reaction. In the projects he built, he followed the Building Code scrupulously. The group that built the project he questioned apparently didn't.
What, he wondered, should he do about that?
My reaction was that he could choose either to be "aggrieved," or to be "in charge." This is, in fact, the choice that we all face, as citizens. Our government, at every level, from local to national, is operated by multiple agencies and is supposed to be following many, many rules. At every level, our government is supposed to be working for us.
Well, let's be honest, lots of governmental agencies - from city building departments to the Pentagon - don't do a very good job of working for us, and often break their own rules, and if you find out what's really going on, you can't help but be mad.
"Getting mad," though, and headlining your grievance, may not cure the problem. Curing the problem takes lots of work, and we citizens (with our own busy lives) resent the fact that we have to get engaged in detailed follow up, just to make sure that our governmental agencies follow their own rules, and work in our interest, as they are supposed to.
Well, when we think about "self-government," what that means, literally, is that we have to be involved in government ourselves. It's important to realize that being "aggrieved" about some failure of our government is only "step one." More is required of us than an expression of outrage.
If we want to be "in charge," we need to "follow up." That means that we will have to use all the tools available (lawsuits probably being last on the list of possibilities, but definitely on that list) to make sure that our government does what it is supposed to do. To be "in charge" of our government, it will be necessary for us to insist that the governmental agencies that are supposed to represent us, and to work on our behalf, actually do that - and do that according to the rules that are supposed to govern how things are to be done.
If we expect someone else - some city bureaucrat, for instance - to operate our government responsibily, we are likely to be "aggrieved" on a periodic basis. If we get organized, though, working with other citizens (this is, essentially a description of "politics") we can move beyond grievance to government.
Wouldn't that be great?
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