The Dance of Death
Editor's Column from LCV Spring 2004
Award-winning editorial by Michael Sartisky, Ph.D.

Every year they file like supplicants before the throne seeking an audience, seeking a hearing, seeking justice, seeking funding on behalf of worthy causes. These are not the hoi polloi, the man or woman off the street, nor are they representatives of corporations, local, national, and multinational, seeking public largesse and subsidy. They are representatives of public agencies, seeking support for education, literacy, healthcare, culture, all the human enterprises that sustain life and give it meaning. They are public servants, not pursuers of private profit.

On Capitol Hill and in the towering art deco statehouse in Baton Rouge, the dance is the same, the litanies echo like deja vu incantations. "If you are in the budget at all, you are lucky." "If your funding is level, if you didn't sustain a cut, you are lucky." It is a realm where there is never a good year. It is a realm where the sun never shines in the corridors, nor optimism in the hearts of man. A realm in which the annual ritual first places the budget blade against the throat, and grants clemency seemingly only reluctantly.

One age-old device in the dance is to posit a zero-sum game, where one just cause may only succeed at the expense of another. A legislator from whom I was seeking support once challenged me, asking did I really want to see people taken off of kidney machines to fund the humanities? "Only three or four," I riposted, trying to gently disengage from the implied premise that we lived in a lifeboat economy, "because while hospitals may keep people alive, the humanities give them reason to live."

After two decades of dancing the dance, I wonder why we, living in the cradle of democracy, subject ourselves to this rite of passage as constant as Mardi Gras, but sorely lacking in its levity or charms?

Why is that when it comes to football, baseball or even track, Louisiana aspires to be the national champion and even halts legislative sessions to salute the victorious athletes? But when it comes to higher education it aspires no further than the embarrassing depths of the "southern regional average"? We intone from the pulpits and crow from the campaign trails how much we love our children, but instead of nurturing them, we offer them the choice of being starved (we lead the nation in children living in poverty) or driven from our borders to seek gainful employment.

Imagining possibilities

Imagine if the Founding Fathers pandered to their electorate and obsessed about lowering taxes rather than promulgating a vision of America as a luminous City on the Hill? Imagine if Thomas Jefferson failed to see the potential of America and had spurned Napoleon's offer of a third of the continent for purchase? Had this one man been blind to opportunity, we would likely be sharing the desperate fate of another French colony in the New World: Haiti.

Imagine if the notoriously thrifty John Adams had failed to recognize the jeopardy of the new nation and not requested of Congress eight wooden hulls to fend off the predations of the Barbary pirates who were jeopardizing American lives and commerce from the coast of North Africa. (Who says history doesn't have a sense of humour, poetic justice, or come full circle?) Imagine if Benjamin Franklin didn't espouse public libraries, or Jefferson the University of Virginia, or FDR rural electrification or Social Security.

If it were not for a now maligned if not forgotten American tradition of communities and the nation investing in themselves above all else, we would still be driving in wagons along rutted roads or poling pirogues through the bayous to cower in our cabins by candlelight.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls

How is it that after two centuries of democratic self-government, we seemingly have forgotten all the lessons of our forebears? How have we so mismanaged our economy that every year the state budget is a dance with death, that the most basic and vital programs and institutions have a sword over their heads, a knife at their throats.

How has it become that we are so niggardly about our private property and ceased to be our brother's keeper that we would rather hunker down in front of a home entertainment center and gape at an illiterate entertainer to while away the evening, than invest in the vitality of our communities, and public spaces, our collective quality of life and welfare? Who has lead us to mistrust our own elected public officials to such an extent that we vote against providing them the means to make our collective lives better? How do we virtually come to acquiesce to "temporary" taxes when the consequence is virtually temporary schools (or private ones), temporary universities, temporary hospitals, temporary libraries? Should we have temporary children and families, too?

Fortunately the solution is not too elusive or obscure. We must structure an economy and a budget that is committed to our own communities. We must tithe ourselves to provide for the world we want our children to live in. We must budget to support essential services to the level that meets our needs and rewards their accomplishments. Else we must barbarize.

—Michael Sartisky, Editor-In-Chief