Tops and Bottoms

I've been commenting lately on the small subset of truisms, aphorisms, platitudes, what-have-you that actually contain a good bit of truth. One of these days, I'll write a book about them or something.

Here's one I like: if something were easy to do, somebody would have already done it.

I bring that up as a preamble to addressing the young idealists out there who recognize that the world is a fucked up place in a lot of ways, with a lot of injustice and needless suffering. I guess I'm one of them, though I'm not as young as I once was (talk about a platitude!).

Chances are, if you see a large, systemic social problem that enrages and saddens you, other people have seen the same thing. You are not the first to care about inequality, poverty, disease, or corruption. Whatever is filling your gas tank with high octane righteous indignation has been felt by armies of idealists who preceded your birth.

So, what does that tell you? It should tell you that these problems are really hard to solve. And there are a variety of reasons why that might be the case.

Now, these idealists tend to split into two camps. The camp I joined (and have since become somewhat disillusioned with) believes that the key to changing things is for the good guys to acquire power, which means controlling government. This is the "top down" approach to solving social problems. This camp believes that social problems are so huge and entrenched and/or diffused that only governments truly have the power to fix them. Therefore, the best approach to solving social problems is to for people who agree with me to win elections.

What this camp tends to miss is that, in a democracy, government agendas are constrained by the public will. So, let's say we want to drastically increase funding for teacher pay and for after-school programs in inner-cities as a way to tackle racial disparities in educational outcomes (both policies I would tend to support); well, that's just not gonna fuckin happen unless the American public wants it to!

Which brings me to the other camp of idealists. These are the grass-roots, non-profit loving, community organizing types. While I still believe that this camp can be naive about the global impact of small-scale efforts and overly pessimistic about the value of government, I have come to see that they are invaluable for one crucial component of political change: agenda setting.

Take, for instance, the organic and local food movement. Is it even conceivable to think of this movement being imposed via a top-down model? Absolutely not. Without having at least some base of support in the public, there's no way government could even consider doing something like providing subsidies for organic foods or blocking efforts by big agri-business to suppress organic food labeling.

So, I guess I've sort of reached a point of synthesis, where I see both of these camps as crucial for achieving meaningful social change. Grass-roots organizations provide advocacy and programming that can very slowly change public attitudes and raise public awareness about important problems and feasible policy solutions to them. However, without people who are willing to engage in the dirty business of electoral politics, these cultural changes will take much, much longer to translate into concrete public policy.

So, in closing...yay for the tie-dye...yay for the ties! Yay for the tops, and yay for the bottoms (if ya know what I mean!).