The Easy Things

There’s a poem I particularly like by Robert Bly entitled “Eleven O’clock at Night” in which the poet lies down in his bed and wonders about the usefulness of his day. Bly asks the all important question: “What did I accomplish today?”

Some years ago I found a sermon, written by my paternal grandfather—it was in Finnish but the title in translation was: “What Does God Ask of You Now?”

I was only 19 or so when I found that sermon and after translating the title I scoffed. “What a silly, old fashioned and entirely dark sensibility,” I thought. I was “hip” after all, and accordingly I was filled with adolescent despair and a lot of bad ideas from the sixties including “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

My Finnish grandfather was an immigrant to the United States. He was a Lutheran minister and he offered church services in rural Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and in his later years to the Finns who worked in the leather tanning factories and quarries in Massachusetts.

I have recently heard civic officials in more than one American city say in public that providing basic services to people who have disabilities is too difficult. I won’t name the towns and I won’t disclose the identities of the Babbit-like city council types—at least not for now. There are plenty of blockheads on the planet’s surface and I’ll risk carpal tunnel if I start typing their names.

My point in this instance is that providing special education to kids in our public schools, or putting in accessible curb cuts are no longer “choices” in the old-fashioned sense—at least the Americans with Disabilities Act says so.

Yet all over America (and even in relatively prosperous towns) one sees and hears a kind of adopted scarcity rhetoric when it comes to the provision of basic civil rights.

Here’s how the thinking that I’m alluding to actually works:

“Well, we, the Good People of (insert town’s name here) would just love
to install a talking traffic signal for the blind, but gee, we ought to
first conduct a survey to find out how many blind people there are in
our town—I mean, it’s all well and good that these three or four blind
people have asked that we make it safe for them to cross the street,
but c’mon, we can’t just throw our civic treasure away on a handful of
poor unfortunates. In truth, they really ought to stay home. That’s the
right thing. And on Sundays someone can bring them some groceries and
some batteries for their radios. I’d like to be more helpful, but you
know, times being what they are and all…blah blah blah…”

Another variant goes like this:

“Well, you know, we the good people of (insert town name here) would
just love to provide excellent special education services to our public
school students, but really, it’s just too hard. Even though we have
the money in our town to do the proper thing and we can in fact put
enough teachers in the classrooms, we somehow imagine that we can avoid
doing this by endlessly wringing our hands and talking about how
complicated our society has become. We take our lead from President
Bush who told the nation that “it’s hard work being President” and
we’ve learned how to smile and grimace at the same time, just like he
does. Blah blah blah”

My Finnish grandfather would say that when you start talking about how
difficult something is, then you’re entering into a conversation with
God.

Now I don’t particularly care whether my blog’s readers believe in god,
nor do I care whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, tall or short,
Yankee fans or Red Sox fans.

What I do care about is holding America accountable for its existing
laws. I shouldn’t have to go to a city council meeting in (insert town
here) and tell the good burghers that providing disability
accommodations is a civil right and not a matter of doing a census
count. I shouldn’t have had to tell them that “we don’t count how many
black people are on the street before we decide to let them into the
Dairy Queen.” (I actually had to make that analogy in (insert town
here).

American politicians and business leaders have adopted a scarcity
rhetoric that is easily trotted out at the slightest inquiry into
(insert social equity right to participate here).

It’s hard work to have a democracy. It’s hard work to give everyone an
equal opportunity to succeed. It’s much easier to under fund public
schools and social programs and claim there’s just not enough jack to
go around. That’s easy.

But when you lie down at night, does the easy thing add up?

S.K.