| | | Shutdown Metaphysics Robert transki
With the shutdown preventing them from maintaining sites on the National Mall in Washington, DC, the federal government is turning to volunteers to help.
No, wait, they're chasing the volunteers away.
The Washington Post reports:
"[Chris] Cox, 45, a chain-saw sculptor from Mount Pleasant, S.C., grabbed the attention of shutdown-weary Washington on Wednesday when he showed up with all his gear and was reportedly spotted mowing the lawn at the Lincoln Memorial."He said the police chased him away, but it was too late. He said he had already been tidying up around the memorial and the Reflecting Pool for the past few days, because nobody else is.
"He drew rapid media attention—social and conventional—as well as a crowd of amused foreign tourists as he stood on the plaza of the memorial Wednesday afternoon and declared his purpose.
"'I figured out that I could play a...valuable role as a janitor, if you will,' he said. 'So I started cleaning up the overflowing trash cans. I bought a blower and I've been blowing all of the trails, and today I cut the grass out here.'"
This exposes the ultimate callousness of the administration's Washington Monument strategy: they are so determined to create an artificial show of suffering that they would turn away volunteers to keep the monuments open, rather than recruit them.
For his part, Cox says he doesn't want to take a stand on the political issues behind the shutdown, but he offers what is, implicitly, a whole political manifesto of its own.
"'The building behind me serves as a moral compass, not only for our country but for the world. And over my dead body are we going to find trash pouring out of these trash cans,' he said. 'At the end of the day, we are the stewards of these buildings that are memorials.'"'I want to encourage my friends and fellow Americans to go to their parks and show up with a trash bag and a rake,' he said."
The question this raises is: why not organize volunteers to care for the memorials on a permanent basis? In reading about Cox's one-man volunteer squad, I was reminded of a similar story that came out of Detroit a few months ago.
"Detroit's fiscal condition has become so dire that private citizens are stepping up to provide basic services, and some experts say the volunteers and entrepreneurs are the Motor City's best hope...."Tom Nardone is the leader of 'The Mower Gang,' a growing group of volunteers who cut the grass at city parks. The business consultant and former analyst with Ford Motor Co. mounted his riding lawnmower and went to work when the cash-strapped city was on the brink of shutting down parks because there was no room in the budget for upkeep....
"Working alone, Nardone started out just mowing under swing sets. But an army of inspired volunteers has joined the Mower Gang, allowing it to take on bigger and bigger projects, including a bicycle track that had been shut down and neglected since the 1980s. The Mower Gang, which has received equipment donations from Husqvarna, now maintains 15 city parks, helping to reclaim recreation space for kids and grownups alike....
"Ted O'Neil, spokesman for the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said it remains to be seen if volunteers and entrepreneurs can save Detroit, but they've already shown that what his organization refers to as 'civil society' can succeed where government fails."
For a city that is a massive object lesson in the failure of big government, the work of these volunteers is an opportunity to learn about the power of individual initiative. All of this reminds me of the analysis offered nearly two centuries ago by Alexis de Tocqueville. He wrote that what defined the unique American attitude, and what made our experiment in self-government work, was precisely this willingness of private citizens to spontaneously band together to solve a problem, often before it could even come to the notice of government. He contrasted this to France, where more than a century of centralization and increasing government power had conditioned citizens to view every problem as the responsibility of some anonymous, far-off authority.
That is precisely the mentality behind the government shutdown, and that's why this story is important.
The point here isn't that we should privatize the U.S. Park Service and turn it into a volunteer corps funding by private donations. It's not a bad idea, but it's a very, very small portion of government, compared to the trillions wasted on middle-class welfare. This story is important for a wider reason: what it shows about the metaphysics of the shutdown, about big government advocates' basic view of reality and of the possibilities of human action.
The basic premise of the shutdown in places like national parks and public monuments is that everything must be done by the state—and, to invoke an ominous reference, that there can be nothing outside the state.
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