Days 333-335 – 4/21-23/12 – Consolidations (long)

People Met = 7

DC is our last big city.  As with Denver, Kansas City and Cincinnati we managed to free up some rest days by hiking ahead of schedule.  Each had its own unique flavor of how we spent those rest days.  This time we spent them with Cindy’s best friend from college, Jean Fregeau.

Jean hiked with us a few times “back in the day.”  She and her brother Jim hiked the John Muir Trail for the college credited course I organized; they both came out to join us for a stretch on the Continental Divide Trail; and Jean and Cindy hiked the Long Trail together.  One thing we could tell right away was that Jean continued to keep herself fit.  Besides being an active “soccer mom” for her three kids Jean runs and cycles.  Her facebook icon reveals she even skydives!

This was a very good stop for Cindy.  I have much work to do on “rest” days and Cindy often struggles for things to do besides her journal and rest (not that rest is a bad thing, I’ll have to try it sometime).  For these three days Cindy had a great time with her old college buddy.

Loretta, hosts Tim and Lily, Felicia, Cindy and Jean at a dinner gathering

There was much food for thought during this layover.  Jean echoed what we first heard from Jay at Starbucks: the greater DC area is doing well economically.  This contrasts with the majority of places we’ve gone through on this journey, places that comparatively are less well off to begin with.  There’s another contrast that forms a telling correlation.  Either government (in the form of post offices) or corporations are closing down and consolidating.  In the case of the DC area the consolidation of military bases provides a boon here … and a bane in many areas across the country.

Ah, but the efficiencies that consolidation brings!  Studies in the eighties, most by Jonathan Sher, started to question the automatically assumed efficiencies that school consolidations brought.  There ended up to be little to no savings due to extra costs in everything from busing to providing many more course and extracurricular activities.  Of course, having all those extras hypothetically meant extra opportunities for our treasured young.

Some kids, mainly those of involved parents, take advantage of these extra opportunities.  Most kids, studies have found (as well as plain observation), are less involved than in the days when smaller schools needed just about all students to be involved in multiple activities to make them go.  Such involvement brought in the parents, rather than the other way around with large schools, and community was nurtured through that conduit.  Ultimately, school consolidation has meant little savings with less overall involvement in percentage of students … and less catalyst for community among all.

This drives home a lesson for all consolidation and growth:  you can be inefficient with spending your dollar, but you also can be unwise.  Both situations lead to waste.  Small scale is often (but not always) inefficient while large scale is often unwise.  Also, with virtually all consolidations “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”  Legislation driven by “money is free speech” will tend to push for consolidations, but that is not the way to go when times are tough for the majority.

The other food for thought was enough to make me angry.  On the Internet I was led to a Daily Show spoof of Fox News pundits declaring a proposed incremental tax on the wealthiest as class warfare.  In particular I was irked by the phrase “the makers and the takers” distinguishing the more and less affluent.  Oh, where to begin?!?!

First, the wealthier you are in this society now, as always, the greater portion of your wealth comes from something other than wages.  Capital gains, inheritances and passive income benefit the wealthiest, ultimately at the expense of people who simply earn their money by producing something.  A more accurate phrase would be “the investors and the makers,” since the wealthiest folks get more income from investments than actually making something in our economy.

Second, it used to be that business paid for national government fully.  The initial purpose of our national government was to enhance our international standing in business.  Furthermore, you cannot concentrate large quantities of money without big government.  The wealthier you are the more fully dependent and indebted you are to larger, national governments to make that happen.  Only with World War I were taxes on wages first applied at the national level.  Since then both taxation of wages and social services have trended upwards towards the national level, a trend that ought to be reversed.

Third, Fox News is simply bad.  I’ve always refrained from singling one corporate media outlet out, because they all have a corporate bias (obviously) that should be taken with a grain of salt.  But in the ongoing efforts of Fox News to frame an issue as class warfare against the rich they are trying to get the less well off in this society to shoot themselves in the foot.  Across the country we’ve witnessed them succeeding to some extent.  A household works longer hours now than in the seventies, but we’ve heard the repeated complaint that people don’t want to work hard anymore, and that complaint always comes from a household where Fox News was watched.

This now ties back to my initial complaint about consolidation.  There are three sectors where consolidations have gone beyond hurting community to hurting democracy:  the financial, energy and media sectors.  At the time I wrote the book Systems out of Balance the greatest period of consolidation for all three came in the nineties, with a Democratic president and Republican congress fully on board.

There is a big difference in how news was presented in the sixties and now.  Corporate media takes a lesson from our corporate culture on how to “sell” or “market” news.  They appeal to our vanity, anger and/or fear, particularly with news talk hosts, and Fox News has been the best at making us vain, angry and/or fearful … but it works!

Oh well, time to get back on the trail where I can focus on kindness and communities again.