“Will the sense of obligation meet the sense of entitlement?
Our country is confronting a geometric rise in the growth of entitlements, more and more of which more and more people consider it the role of government to provide, even if the government has to go deeper and deeper into debt to do so. The very latest of the entitlements, health insurance for all, or almost all, has just been enacted by the Congress, and was done so irresponsibly, almost without regard for the need or ability to pay of the beneficiaries.
More and more our government does seem to be in the business of giving us something “for nothing,” such as arms, —aircraft carriers, and wars —in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East, both of which we can’t afford and don’t need, and most recently, home ownership and now health care, both of which have somehow become in the thinking of those in the government the right of all.
Home ownership was going to make responsible citizens of everyone, in this case responsibility following rather than as in the past preceding the ownership of one’s home. Instead the resulting housing bubble and burst nearly brought down our entire economy.
For it didn’t turn out that people living in homes they couldn’t afford become responsible home owners, anymore than people with the gift of government provided health care now become more responsible for their own health.
Nothing new about any of this. Just recently I was rereading David Halberstam’s 1992 book, The Next Century, which was not so much about our century, as the last one. Halberstam was writing in a second epilogue about the “new,” Yeltsin led Russia, in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup to ouster Gorbachev and return Russia to the Soviet Union.
Halberstam was not hopeful that the new Russia would be much different from the old Soviet Union (and during the nearly 20 years since then his opinion seems to have been borne out). For in order for it to happen, that Yeltsin’s new Russia become anything at all like a Western liberal democracy, the people’s sense of obligation would have to meet [and overcome] the people’s sense of entitlement. Individual responsibility would have to suddenly appear, and from nowhere.
From nowhere because for the nearly 70 years of Soviet rule, as well as during the prior centuries under the Czars the people were never allowed to grow and develop responsibility for their own lives. Instead, they grew to accept, became habituated to, knew nothing other than the Tsarist or Communist leader who made all the important decisions for them including what kind of clothes and shoes would be made, what the schools would teach, what jobs would need to be done, what positions filled etc.
Under this system in regard to basic needs the people were provided for, although minimally, but the only freedom they knew came in the form of the crash of trees falling in the forest out of the purview of the government, or the sound of their own voices restricted to the spaces about a kitchen table.
Now our own past is diametrically opposed to that of Russia. Our country got its start by the people, one succession of immigrants after another, taking on from the moment of their arrival here the responsibility for their own lives. And this current is still very much alive (although centuries of open immigration are now threatened, as in the new Arizona police state) and with any luck it may continue to provide us with a bright future.
Unlike Russia our history has been as much that of the people, and what they have done with their freedom of thought and movement, as that of the government and what it has done with its power of command.
But will it continue, the story of our country as being mostly that of hundreds of thousands of individuals coming here and finding themselves free to do whatever they want as long as it didn’t interfer with the freedom of others? Now, perhaps for the first time other than in war time, there are large and growing numbers of people, although probably not yet a majority, who depend more on government than on their own actions for their livelihood. We don’t yet know what this will mean for all of us.
Writing about Yeltsin’s Russia Halberstam said, “Russia was a nation which resisted all the implications of political and economic democracy, a nation which lived by decree and by diktat….Is there [now] enough of a tradition of individual responsibility to give the nation a beginning of modernization? Or have expectations and a sense of entitlement already exceeded the reality of the amount of obligation required?”
We might ask of ourselves a similar question, now in the aftermath of the passage of the health care legislation, whether the people’s growing sense of what is theirs, what the government owes them, whether this now threatens to overshadow, if not overcome their own sense of personal obligation and responsibility.
Or will it be in our country, as David asks about Russia, that “the sense of obligation meet that of the sense of entitlement?” He doesn’t say so, but I would add, “meet and overcome.”
