We Pluribus Unum : No Thin Blue Lines

 

I want to talk about this flag but first I want to talk about infrastructure.

I live in a suburb that was founded in the late nineteenth century. Some of the houses date from then but there are a lot more that were built in the postwar boom in suburbanization. That means that the pipes we have under the street are getting old. The city was connected with water and sewer pipes and then streets and sidewalks were laid on top of that without much thought of how to access the pipes. The layout was not a problem when the village was shiny and new. But over time things break and you must access the pipes and sometimes that means digging a hole through asphalt and cement. Over time things degrade and you also might realize that the material you made the pipes with has a chance to leech heavy metal into the drinking water. Upgrades are necessary.

We’re looking at this with our sewers as the fall apart. There are connections that have lead that need to be replaced for safety reasons and legal reasons. The question is how to pay for it. Does it make sense to just have the homeowner connected closest to the problem pay out of pocket? Not really – it’s a big one-time expense that needs done and the whole community benefits. The most equitable way to fix it is through taxation or fees. Our village board is increasing the water rates. People aren’t happy since the cost of living continues to increase but this is the way that all users can invest in the system. It’s a village problem with a collective solution.

In the candy-colored world of elementary schools civics, this is what government is for at its most base level. It coordinates collective action to solve collective problems. Here our democratically elected board came to the decision that made the most sense for the community. But this isn’t always the case. People are often not involved in their civic life – our board elections only receive something like 20% turnout and even the presidential elections see a third of people not participating in the election for whatever reasons they have.

This abstention is in part because people are alienated from the process. The government doesn’t feel like an extension of our collective will. Though you will hear about our representative democracy – “A republic if you can keep it” – the people who represent us, especially at the higher levels, feel like a breed apart. At the federal level, even our representatives in the house represent about 700,000 people in spite of Madison’s warnings in the Federalists papers. Writ large, the various representatives are not responsive to their constituents but more so to their donors. Reading about the mechanics of the job it sounds like half of a rep’s time is spent in dialing for dollars, fundraising for themselves and the party so they can get reelected. It sounds like a horrible job despite its prestige. I’m very conscious that in multiple roles I have that I serve the public. I’m a local elected official and I work for a nonprofit that has state contracts, so in diverse ways I am a steward of the public trust. I am not apart from the community but a part of the community.

Others have different approaches – typified by the thin blue line flag. This symbol leans into the othering of the government and its servants as something apart from the people. This flag says that you and I are different and through my role I am special. That’s not just so. The original flag is a symbol of unity. The thirteen colonies coming together to make one United States, a nation with problems in practice but with grand ideals at its foundation. The recent shootings and the failure of the police in  Uvalde have had me reflecting on this symbolism. The children who were shot down were our children. Someone else gave birth to them but they were all ours and we failed to protect them as we failed the young man pulled the trigger as well. It’s a collective problem with collective solutions. No one stands apart.