One idea from Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s State of the City speech caught my attention most.
“The eyes of our communities are solidly upon us,” he said. “Our local residents need housing, our most vulnerable need help, our sick need medical care and our people need protecting.”
He went on to propose remedies.
It wasn’t high drama or aimed at any political base, just a plain assessment of Honolulu’s pressing concerns and how he thinks the city government can help.
His audience, which included other top Hawaii leaders, listened respectfully.
It was city government — all levels of government, actually — at its most nuts-and-bolts: a pooling of resources to address mutual needs for the common good, the heart of our society.
I compared Blangiardi’s focus with Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, 100 minutes of gloating about his election, mocking his predecessor, exaggerating his achievements, taunting opponents with juvenile insults and schoolyard threats of revenge, engaging in self-pity, rehashing old personal grievances and bashing easy scapegoats like transgenders and immigrants for the offense of wishing for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
New policy proposals were few, and there was sparse talk of the kinds of critical and tangible public services Blangiardi spoke of, especially those being lost to the Elon Musk-led undoing of meat-and- potatoes agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Education, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Veterans Affairs and Social Security Administration.
Half the audience cheered wildly and the other half heckled as Americans viewed this extravagant display of how unmoored we’ve become from our founding principles. It’s not only democracy at risk, but also our basic civilization — a people bound together in a shared way of life supported by organized social and political structures.
What struck me from Blangiardi’s remarks is that part of the solution to the national crisis might be for the federal government to start acting more like a municipal government with a keen-eyed focus on solving practical problems instead of ideological abstractions.
It’s not the job of our national government to re- litigate the Civil War, stoke a new culture war or entertain the extremes of our society with performative governance modeled on the crudest reality TV. It’s the job of the federal government to use the massive resources at its disposal to address real needs common to most Americans.
Nothing will stop our elected leaders from fighting their politically profitable culture wars in these polarized times, but it doesn’t have to be the main pursuit.
These skirmishes don’t need to stop the government from competently fulfilling such basic functions as keeping people safe, preventing airplanes from falling out of the sky, insuring our food doesn’t include rat droppings, delivering the mail and making sure proper benefits get to Social Security recipients and military veterans. Everybody should want that.
If leaders focused more on these functions and got them working smoothly for the benefit of all Americans, perhaps it would relieve some of the anger at government and put us in a better state of mind to deal constructively with the divisive social issues.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
