Public or Private = Missing the Point

See the secret committees, commence with their meetings
To make red tape in response to simple questions
Questions threaten the perception of the beneficial systems
A pyramid scheme with its cogs and its pistons
Mechanization of men, making more and more
Live in a miserable existence
How can so few claim so many victims
And this begs the question
My rest is a weapon against the oppression
Of man's obsession to control things
Look at the long line of make-believe kings
The lord of the flies wants you to kiss his ring
Follow new rules with invisible strings
And become a puppet in the diabolical scheme
How do good men become part of the regime
They don't believe in resistance
~Josh Garrels, "Resistance"


The other day, I was sitting in an initial orientation meeting for writing teachers at IUPUI, and the subject of parking passes came up. It surfaced that IUPUI had outsourced--privatized--the role, which drew predictable resentment from some of the teachers in the room who prefer "public options." "No one is ever responsible," quipped one female teacher. "You always get referred to someone else, and they don't know the answer either."

Parking at IUPUI is limited and expensive, and I found out the extensiveness of the exploitation later that day when a worker I don't know--sitting on the other side of a desk--slapped me emotionlessly with a $95 parking pass for the next three months. I am scraping by financially, but I'm also aware that my situation is probably much better than so many of the other students who were being charged the same ridiculous price.

Then, as I sat through the meeting, it became apparent that the public university with which I am employed has the same problem as the woman diagnosed as the result of privatization. About a dozen of us were gathered--most of us for the first time--to have logistical and content questions answered, hopefully relieving some of the uncertain anxiety welling inside us. But no such relief came. Question after question went deferred, unanswered, or answered only in part. Often, we were told someone else would have the answer, and that we would be e-mailed the correct protocol for whatever specific procedure was at stake.

I do not blame the facilitator; I blame the structure and scale. Debating private or public is an attempt to answer the wrong question. When we accept massive, centralized, and hierarchical structures then we inevitably run into endless confusion and red tape. Bureaucracy is probably the best word for it, and while some of it is inevitable in this life, we certainly don't need as much as we have. In bureaucracies, no one accepts responsibility. Exploitation becomes the norm because there are wide gaps between producers and sellers and buyers. Chances are, these people don't know each other. In the context of a university, the gaps are between administrators, faculty, staff, and students. Think about your experiences with your local BMV as another relevant example.

Is there a better alternative? Yes. I have cried out for it on this blog again and again. Wendell Berry has been writing about it for fifty years. Thomas Jefferson wrote about it a couple hundred years ago. There are others. If there were only two broad themes in the work of John Milton, they would probably have been pleas for both freedom and for virtuous living. I'm not sure we can do without those two things if we are to live worthwhile lives.

So the better alternative is thinking in terms of neighborhoods. "All politics is local," Congressman Tip O'Neil once said. It is not an accident that you'd rather go to the local mom and pop restaurant than Applebees. Nor is it an accident that you trust the local bank more than the Bank of America. Or that you get better produce at the farmer's market than you do at Kroger's. Better service from Dave's Auto in Anderson than you do at Jiffy Lube. Or that movements that create lasting change start at the grassroots.

When Christ told us to love, He told us to love God and our neighbor. This does not mean we don't care for the person on the opposite coast or on a different continent. It just means as human beings we have considerable limits. And it means real expressions of love are tangible, not theoretical.

Maybe if we were more worried about feeding, ensuring, and educating our neighbors and less concerned about doing all those things for everyone--a well-intended but drastically misguided notion--I imagine we would have much better results. And perhaps we might even know our neighbors, instead of averting our eyes every time we see them because we are too busy to engage them as something other than a political issue.