Thursday, December 22, 2016

End of the year, and I haven't said much...


It’s the end of the year, and this will be the second post I’ve done in 2016. Yeah, life took over again. However, with this year being an election year, I made a conscious decision to keep my thoughts and opinions to myself because it was just getting too messy and there were a lot of angry and upset people. I’m not going to quit being someone’s friend simply because I don’t ascribe to their political viewpoint. While I believe my vote is my business, I have no illusion my vote is secret. My county knows which ballot is mine and I’m sure it would take them less than an hour to find it. At the same time, I don’t believe in screaming from the rooftops who I voted for. If who I voted for is going to be a point of contention between us, then for your sake I’ll say I voted for your favorite candidate. And we’ll leave it at that. In my estimation, life is far too short to have something so transient come between me and someone I like.
So: In about a month, we will have a new President. Someone who has held no prior elected office, and in some respects appears to be a blank slate (perhaps he’s kept his true opinions to himself, but I think Twitter shows otherwise). His choices for different cabinet posts run the gamut from political professionals to business leaders. There’s one thing I’ve noticed though. If you look at some of his choices (we’ll take the EPA and Education in particular) you see an interesting phenomenon. Allow me to give some information on those people, and then discuss what I see.
His choice for the EPA is Scott Pruitt. Mr. Pruitt made his mark as the Oklahoma Attorney General fighting the EPA on its regulations, particularly in regards to oil and gas drilling. On the surface, this looks like a ‘fox in the henhouse’ type of choice. And this same observation could also be applied to Trump’s pick for Education, Betsy DeVos. She is an education activist from Michigan. Her perspective on education is one of ‘school choice’, providing vouchers for parents to send their children to private education, if they so choose. Which could result in a mass exodus from public education, and/or significant defunding of school districts.
In thinking about these, and some other choices (I’m thinking Housing and Urban Development and Labor in particular), I’ve come to a conclusion. Using business as a baseline of understanding instead of government, these people were nominated for these positions not as a ‘fox in the henhouse’ but rather to reduce the size of that department, or perhaps to even shut them down.
There are examples of businesses sending people into problematic organizations or departments for this purpose. Whether it’s simply to ‘trim the fat’ or to close it down, they have no other purpose. Those people tend to be categorized as ‘hatchet men’, since they're doing a lot of cutting.
Something else to keep in mind is, when you look at these two departments, they are fairly recent cabinet creations. The EPA was created in 1970 by President Richard Nixon (it was originally put in place by Executive Order, but the order was ratified by Congress). The Department of Education was created in 1979 by law and signed by President Jimmy Carter. Neither of these departments have a long history, and both tend to be controversial in their activities. This makes them preferred targets for elimination by those who do not like government departments and the like.
Looking at this a little further, this fits well into Conservative views on government. For those in the Republican Party who ascribe to the quote by President Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem, it is the problem.” These choices match well with this view. Get rid of the bureaucracy and overreach by the Federal Government by cleaning out the bureaucrats and closing down the unnecessary departments.
Whether or not this is what Trump is trying to do has yet to be seen, as well as what the result will be. I am not ‘cautiously optimistic’ at this point. I am simply cautious. I cannot remember there ever being this much acrimony and divisiveness in the changing of administrations. I’m not talking about just the Republicans and what they potentially are implementing, but also the Democrats and their reactions. The election is over, and if we believe in our system of government, then, in a paraphrase of the late Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock in ‘The Undiscovered Country’ “we must have faith that things will unfold as they should.” I say this for myself first and foremost.
There is one other darker element to this, and it is a concern for the country at large regarding the acrimony and divisiveness: If things do not significantly change, and if both sides continue to refuse to discuss and work together to solve the problems and issues our country has, and resolve to do only those things you want to do, the resulting polarization may leave us in an ungovernable situation. Now please keep in mind, I would hope that I’ve proven throughout all of this that I’m not one of those screaming Trump is not my President, or otherwise having a meltdown over the election result. I’m someone who has some serious concerns that the person we elected is going to do more harm than good in the long run. Now, what does that make me? A liberal? A ‘loony leftist’? No. That makes me someone who is more concerned about my country than about what half-baked political party is in charge of the government.