Now this is interesting.
Reactive costs around emergency services is unsustainably high. Cops, their benefits and their resources cost a bundle. Fire and emergency medical services - the folk who respond to 911 calls, including everything from home fires to car crashes to EDP situations on the street - they cost a bundle, too.
But we need these things, right? We have to be tough on crime, which means these are justified costs; we have no business influencing public behaviour or offering handouts to people who might otherwise commit crimes, get into accidents or cause themselves harm - that'd be too much like committing sociology.
Far better we cut proactive social services, support for charities and all that kind of lefty stuff to afford the back-end costs of cleaning up avoidable messes.
Yet it's vital that taxes be low, because people should have a right not to invest in public infrastructure and social sustainability or some such. If we can't raise taxes to pay increasingly expensive, reactive emergency/crisis services, what do we do?
Heck, it's a proven thing that the private sector is better at everything than government, right? Why not outsource policing, like we do with garbage? The magic of the free market will ensure the best service at the lowest price, right?
I wonder what Blackwater charges for city policing. Or those cops in Ferguson; they'll be looking for new work before too long.
The path that we're on is not a sustainable one; slowly but surely, we're creeping down a dark road of fractured society, increased marginalization of growing communities that will be "managed" by security forces that don't answer directly to the public, nor to elected officials, who answer to their Parties first anyway.
It's the Decline of the Roman Empire, Western style.
This is before we take into account aging infrastructure, poverty, employment, health, mental health, gridlock and all the rest of it.
These things are connected; it's folly to think otherwise, even though that's what we tend to do. What does heart health have to do with exercise, or work stress? Why should I have to pay out-of-pocket to help someone else's kids - even if those payments can help prevent their kids from shooting mine down the road?
The reality is this - every man for himself is not going to work. We have to get organized - we have to figure out how we're going to live here. No one is going to do that for us; no one is going to sweep our problems away. It's all on us.
Us - not us vs them, but the collective us; white, black, gay, transgendered, Muslim, Jew, pauper and king; we all live on the same earth, breathe the same air, so on and so forth. There is no ground except common ground.
So what next, ideally?
First things first - recognize that short-term fixes don't save money, they simply allow costs to fester. We need to stop looking at short-term ROI and start making long-term investments in infrastructure, in people, in systems. Fiscally, we can't do this by piling on to our debt - there has to be another way.
Fortunately, there is, but it requires a massive change of perspective from people in every corner of society. We have to engage, to want to engage with each other, from top to bottom. The incredibly wealthy need to understand they haven't earned the right to live above society; investments in their world are beneficial to them. The marginalized need to realize they are as much a part of our whole as anyone else, but will have to learn some comms skills and the like to have their voice recognized and opportunities provided.
I'd frame it like this - society needs to come 25% of the way to the elite, who having the most resources should have no problem coming 75% of the way to the middle. For the poorest, most disenfranchised, the ratio gets reversed - society needs to come 75% of the way to them and stay engaged for the long-haul. No one-offs here.
Why on earth would we do this? It sounds a bit too much like work, like change, like pandering or cow-towing. Fuck the others, it's us against them, or they simply don't matter.
This is the Burning Platform, the Tragedy of the Commons; we are loathe to do what is in our own best interests long-term, because we simply aren't that rational. We're selfish, petty, short-sighted, flawed. We fumble in the darkness of ignorance - all of us.
How might we motivate, catalyze culture change on a global scale?
It's been done before; there are models out there of how to get massive social blocks to embody the Golden Rule, to practice hygiene and see supporting one's neighbour not as a bother or a hand-out but a responsibility.
As always, it comes down to carrots and sticks. You need a threat, one so massive and daunting that there is no way money can help you escape it. We're seeing that threat emerging now - social chaos, infrastructure collapse, the Godzilla Armageddon. Ebola, Ferguson, crushing debt, unemployment, war, collapsing infrastructure - it goes on and on. I don't care how much money you have; when the whole world is on fire, there's nowhere that money can take you.
The threat of collapse due to our own shortsightedness is part of the picture, but not the whole one. After all, there's enough information out there right now to show us the risks of pretending we live in silos, yet we do it anyway. Something more is required.
Enter the carrot. We're not going to leave the burning platform unless there is somewhere more desirable for us to go - that's simply the way people work. So, what does this better world look like? How do we get from here to there?
This is where vision comes in - something we've not heard a lot about in our political discourse for quite some time. We've had plenty of pronouncements, plenty of vague resentment, but an actual vision? We have almost forgotten how to dream, it seems.
Which is where we return to emergency management and individual preparedness.
We can't collectively afford the cost of back-end emergency response; we don't feel like we can afford the cost of prevention, either, though it's invariably cheaper to stay healthy rather than it is to cure a disease.
Instead of outsourcing emergency preparedness/response, we need to internalize that capacity; every home should have an emergency management plan, every community a coordinated response plan and hand-off mechanism.
When the next big storm hits and there are too few emergency responders to get to everyone consistently for days, weeks on end, people will need the ability and resources to collaborate and hold the fort until support arrives.
That means training, social-emotional resiliency-building to help with the stress and above all, empowerment. These also happen to be good tools for citizens to have to be engaged citizens in a responsible society.
Another thing about engaged, responsible citizens?
They're far better at holding government to account, open style. That means not treating politics like a spectator sport, cheering or jeering from the sidelines but getting on the field, putting some skin in the game.
People are more than their home lives or their communities, though - they are work, they are school, they are transit. As it stands now, we design life in silos - work and home are supposed to be separate; transit is considered a pathway, not a barrier, which it often is; people are viewed in terms of their assets and liabilities rather than as whole creatures in a social ecosystem.
We need more engaging leaders in all sectors that don't look at their companies or the world as a pyramid on which they sit at the top, but a system of which they are part; the more they take from the common ground, the less there is for others, impacting their growth. When they block out the sun, others can't but wither.
Society's like a garden that way.
The allusions here are intentional; hopefully they connect the dots for you as they do for me.
We can build that better world, should we choose to work together. Things will continue to get worse the longer we opt not to.
Something we collectively need to be conscious of.
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