A Pessimist's Optimism About the Government
Possibly the last thing I'll post from that ghodawful Government class I was taking. The one that ended almost four months ago. The one that I'm still not done with...
This paper was supposed to be a collaborative effort (I worked on it alone, except for the inspiration I have derived from those around me whom I feel I can talk to about politics), and the topic was "5 reasons you can trust the government, and 5 reasons you can't trust the government." I have no idea how many reasons I have on either side, but I very much wanted to just get this over with.
There are many reasons both to trust and not trust government and government agencies. The key is to recognize all of these reasons as subjective, apply them along with your morals as a guide, and realize that government is by individual human beings; humans are quite fallible.
It is important to realize that within politicking, there is a sincere attempt to guide public perception. While this may lead to dishonesty, deception and at times outright lies, this is not necessarily the case. There has to exist a time where politicians, especially once they are in office, are working simply for the greater good and even possibly to the detriment of the opinion of the public.
Personally, I have to believe that we can trust the government. As I mentioned, the American government is by the people. How can one go through life with an inherent and absolute distrust of other people? I feel you’d have to be (or soon become) mad to do so. Another reason that I can’t help but trust the government is my role as a cog in the great machine. It’s a sore point for me, as a member of the Military Intelligence community, that the intelligence services are often used as a scapegoat in recent events: the Abu Ghraib prison incidents, lack of strong analysis of Iraq’s capabilities, whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or not, and the thousands of hours of untranscribed tapes of intercepted voice signals sitting at the Federal Bureau of Investigations headquarters. Having worked with a good number of soldiers, both in and out of the intelligence field, I can say that the vast majority of them are there to do their job, and you can trust them to do it.
However, sometimes the bureaucracy and the sheer size of the government, and the military, get in the way of its efficiency. This can be seen in the lack of analysis of the intelligence information I mentioned above, in the prosecution of those responsible for the atrocities in the Abu Ghraib prison, and in the nightmare of the Individual Ready Reserve call-ups.
We can’t discount entirely the politicking that occurs, either. While it’s nice to think that perhaps the ends justifies the means, misrepresenting the situation to get your political agenda forwarded is not ethical. But, it is accepted. While the Democrats rail that the Republicans want to quietly instate a draft, a bill calling for an actual draft sits waiting in Congress, entirely sponsored by the Democrats. While the Republicans go on about how invading Iraq was worth it, it seems that the American public was mislead into thinking there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, as evidenced by numerous polls at the time of the Iraq invasion.
But government is not all gloom and doom, especially potentially at the local level. Smaller units of government avoid some of the bureaucratic pitfalls of the larger groups. Local governments are closer to the people, so are more directly accountable for their actions.
And we have to think that someone involved in politics is in it for us.