Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 13. Sunrise is 7:20 and sunset is 4:51 for 9 hours 31 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 5 PM and the Whitewater Common Council meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner are sworn in for their second terms as President and Vice President; it is the first time a presidential inauguration takes place on January 20 since the 20th Amendment changed the dates of presidential terms.
Now: if there are Steps for Blogging on a Policy or Proposal, and if a blogger assesses What Ails, What Heals, and if one chooses between a posture to Support, Oppose, or Refrain, then is there any other fundamental to add?
There is at least one more: the public and private, political and private institutions, are of fundamentally different natures. The public is, and in a well-ordered society must be, open and available to all. In Whitewater, that means open and available to all to 15,000 residents. (To apply a welcome expression from the Whitewater Unified School District’s superintendent, “all means all.”)
And yet, and yet, we see in our small city of fifteen thousand a mere fifteen or so who would bend the public institutions to their will, for their ends. For them, public institutions are to be captured and directed to their private ends. They see local government as another object to be acquired. Government is simply another purchase for them.
(Perhaps they were told years ago that the city was more theirs than others, that it was their birthright. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. You’ll excuse me if I do not set aside centuries of political teaching for the selfish delusions of a few small-town men. Those who would prefer that a small and beautiful American city were possessed by only a few should work on a time machine to take them back to a vulgar medieval village. It would be, I think, where they would be happiest.)
Whitewater’s government belongs to all and yet to no one person. This is the fundamental limitation on its conduct — it cannot be possessed by a few, it must be open to all, and none can act within it in conflict with these precepts.
How should we imagine a sound government’s nature and limitations? Well-ordered government is like a fish that, however beautiful, can live only in water. For fish, gills allow the extraction of oxygen from water. Some can live for a short time outside the water, but not for long. Without water, no respiration, without respiration, no life. A fish’s body might yet remain after death, but the fish’s nature is wholly different.
To think of sound government this way — as a fish that can live only in water, only under definite conditions — reminds us that sound government cannot be anything that any one person wants for himself or herself. A ‘fish out of water’ is more than an animal out of place; it’s a dead animal.
There are a few private men in this town who are quite sure that local government can be, indeed must be, whatever they want.
No and no again.