There is a concept called “mental load”—the weight of knowing all the Things That Need to Get Done Around the House. Someone has to know when to do laundry, take out the trash, buy groceries, locate the winter clothes, cook dinner, set a budget, vacuum, etc. This is the kind of labor that, if not properly divided, ruins marriages and drives people to the brink.
Now multiply that mental load by 343 million. That’s the number of people in the house of America. You can’t worry only about buying the groceries; you must also worry about whether those groceries are radioactive. You don’t just have to make sure the kids are dressed for the weather; you must also forecast the weather. It’s not enough to merely buy eggs; you must also know how much eggs should cost, and what they cost last week, because the economy sort of depends on it.
What became a five-month quest to assume government responsibilities took me from the overgrown fields of Antietam to the cramped basket of a hot-air balloon about 1,400 feet over Ohio; from a biology lab at Johns Hopkins University, where I beheaded flies, to a farmstead in Maryland, where I inspected the fly-bothered udder of a cow named Melissa.
And the potential duties kept piling up as I learned about each round of cuts. Since I started typing this paragraph, Donald Trump has fired many of the people who surveil infectious diseases; before I finish typing this paragraph, he may have hired them back. I hope so! I would do almost anything for a good story, but perhaps I should draw the line at “monitor Ebola.”
John F. Kennedy famously implored us: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I asked! And the answer is: lots of things. If you don’t mind doing them wrong.
Obviously individuals cannot personally fulfill all the things a government does, but that’s because the government is a large group of people. A similarly large group of people who are not employed by a government can still accomplish the same tasks; a weather forecaster for example doesn’t stop being one just because they’re not doing it for a government.
If critical functions that protect lives can be gutted and lost at the whims of a remote and sometimes hostile government we clearly have little control over, perhaps that’s the wrong structure to maintain those functions? After all, it’s not like Trump hasn’t floated enforcing different regulations or providing or not providing help based on location (i.e. excluding Blue states from federal aid) anyways, so even keeping the jobs and regulations in place doesn’t mean they’re actually going to be used to help us.
A lot of the functions like water quality monitoring are done at local levels anyways, even if regulations around them are federal.
Maybe a better lesson from this is that just one civically-engaged person can make a huge difference to a community.
farce
