The Common Un-Good

Americans live in a culture that resists common good. I once worked for a company that (briefly) preached to its employees, “What is good for you personally will be good for the company.” The absurdity of that statement quickly became clear as aggressive office politics and fraud escalated.

In public life, that word ‘public’ takes a beating. Public transportation. Public utilities. Public education. Public health. Public housing. Public lands. It seems any shared benefit is Socialist. Socialist! But no one talks about public harm in the same way. Carbon, VOCs, and particulates in our air. Forever chemicals in our drinking water. A strained power grid. Communicable disease. We share these costs in common. Common un-good.

What if we flipped the script and labeled public harm ‘Socialist’? Would it make any difference? Or, would the term be defanged and just come to mean ‘common investment’ or ‘shared cost’ of civilized society?

Let’s not keep two sets of books, where we privatize benefits and socialize costs.

As

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. — Matthew 6:10

If it's what we pray for, it's what we should want and work for. So, how is it in heaven? We need imagination for that, something God gave us the capacity for. Most of us were best at it when we were children. Dependency, trust, and imagination: is this what it means to have child-like faith?

Pond Water

In my office, I have a jar of pond water. It's a mixture of grit, sand, silt, and other pond-y stuff. When I shake it up, I'm reminded of how most of us move through our days. Life's ingredients suspended by the churn. When we want some clarity, we can pause, allowing the big bits to settle. But if we need things to be really clear, it will take more time, a lot more time.