What of the students’ alleged ambition to “make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world”? Well, why not start closer to home? Instead of “changing the world,” why not try to change your crummy school and your rundown town? Or does that lack the Obama-esque glamour of healing the planet? Come to that, why would the rest of humanity want to have the world changed by someone who can’t organize a paint job?
In practice, one-worldism conveniently absolves one of doing anything about more localized and less exotic concerns—such as peeling paint and leaking ceilings. And, if a schoolhouse is so afflicted, what’s the best way to fix it? Applying for federal funds and processing the building maintenance through a huge continental bureaucracy? Or doing what my neighbors in New Hampshire did when the (older than Dillon) grade-school bell-tower was collapsing? The carpenters and painters donated their time, and the materials were paid for through the proceeds of such non-world-changing activities as community square dances and bean suppers.
If that sounds sick-makingly Norman Rockwell, well, take it from me, small town life is hell and having to interact with folksy-type folks in a “tightly knit community” certainly takes its toll, and the commemorative photo montage in the restored tower of gnarled old Yankees in plaid looking colorful while a-hammerin’ and a-shinglin’ doesn’t fully capture many of the project’s arcane yet fractious disputes. Still, forget the cloying small-town sentimentality: it’s the quickest and cheapest way to get the job done.
It always is.
Dillon, South Carolina, is a city of about 6,000 people. Is there really no way they can organize acceptable accommodation for a two-grade Junior High School without petitioning the Sovereign in Barackingham Palace?
Like many municipalities with a significant black population, Dillon has an absence of men: in a quarter of its households, the only adult is a female; in the town as a whole, there are 80 men for every 100 women. Then again, painting walls does not require a burly old brute, and, with a county employment rate of 15 percent, there are surely residents of Dillon with time available.3 Wouldn’t it have made an inspiring tale if, instead of beseeching King Barack the Two-Coats, the people of Dillon had just got on with it and done it themselves? It’s the sort of thing they’d once have made a heartwarming TV movie about:
Ah, but instead of the can-do spirit we now have the can-do-with-some-government-funding spirit. And it’s hard to get an inspirational heartwarmer out of that.
From
Even if the federal behemoth were capable of timely classroom repainting from D.C. to Hawaii, consider the scale of government and the size of bureaucracy that would be required. Once such an apparatus is in place, it won’t content itself with paint jobs. The issue is not the decrepitude of the building but the decrepitude of liberty. Maybe Big Government can spend enough of our children’s money to halt the degradation of infrastructure. But the degradation of citizenship—of the “spirit of liberty”—is harder to reverse.
As dispiriting as Miss Bethea’s letter was, Obama’s citation of it was even more so. How could any citizen-president of a self-governing republic quote approvingly a plea for remote, centrally regulated, continent-wide dependency?
