The Government Shutdown and Half-Empty America
Subjected to the report of an illegal immigrant who murdered a California police officer last December, many Americans concluded the national government is not protecting them. Reports of food poisoning due to contaminated Romaine lettuce, led others to question government's ability to ensure food safety. Yet using individual incidents to draw wide-ranging conclusions about government's effectiveness is as suspect as using the temperature on a given day to judge the state of the climate.
When most Americans look at government, they see only a partial picture, in these times especially shaped by social media and interest groups with axes to grind. To many, the government shutdown is thus no big deal - they're just a "bunch of paper-pushers" as one citizen described it. What too many American see is, sadly, a glass half-empty.
How accurate is this perception? During the partial government shutdown, national parks and museums have been closed, crop subsidy payments to keep farmers afloat are not being made, and low income housing subsidies to keep poor people in their homes are not available. Had the government not kept "essential" workers on the job, TSA (and airports) would have shut down, border enforcement would have ended, the Coast Guard would have been in port, and the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration would have sent everyone home.
While many are dissatisfied with government services, many are not. Scanning results from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation has a score of 91 (out of 100) from retirees, who depend on it for pensions they were promised by private sector firms that defaulted. Scores for the Veterans Health Administration range from 83-86. Home owners of the Small Business Administration's disaster relief efforts give it a score of 85. Just for comparison, the average rating of all hospitals in the ACSI database is 76 and of all private sector property insurers is 81.
But the successes of government are not news.
How many terrorist incidents did the government prevent in 2018? How many bank failures did it prevent so judiciously that the banking system survived the 2008 financial meltdown? How many commercial aircraft disasters did it avoid last year? How many lives did it help through Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? These statistics are not news either.
Or consider the first few hours of your day, during which you turn on the lights, take a shower, eat breakfast, get in your car, drive to work, use your laptop, and text, phone or email someone. Government success makes these events possible, from reasonable and dependable electricity, water and food (not to mention home construction), to safe vehicles and highways, to building construction codes, to communications technology.
One of the greatest national feel-good stories in the last decade was the successful water landing of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River by its pilot, Capt. Sully Sullenberger on January 15, 2009. But you probably don’t recall hearing that the government trained him, first at the Air Force Academy, then at Purdue University, and also in flight training and as a combat pilot. You might also not know that Air Traffic Controllers - government employees - cleared the skies of other potentially threatening aircraft in a matter of seconds and then contacted local rescue squads to fish Capt. Sullenberger and his passengers out of the Hudson that day. Those parts of the story were not news.
Americans tend to focus on heroes not the organizations that develop and support them. We have such an ingrained distrust of government that giving it credit can cast a reporter’s credibility (and toughness) into question, by her audience as well as by her colleagues. The definition of “news” precludes routine events, which do not stoke the anger or disgust that drive viewers to click on a story or retweet it. And much of government success is, thankfully, quite routine.
So Americans might be forgiven for seeing their government as a glass half-empty. But it's a dangerous distortion that fosters a stereotype that can become self-fulfilling. When the spotlight becomes a searchlight seeking those to blame, when criticism and oversight make government workers fear taking initiative, and when both lead to withholding resources and paychecks, we create the conditions to produce the kind of government we don’t want.
Government is not perfect. Seeing its performance once in a while as successful will not make it perfect. It deserves close scrutiny when it errs. But it deserves positive coverage when it succeeds. Unless we restore that balance, the glass may be empty when we most need it full.
Photo Credit: daveynin
