As Mr. Trump tweets daily about draining the swamp and ridding the Justice Department, FBI, Defense Department, Environmental Protection Agency of those deep state, detestable government careerists, Mad Dog wishes Amy Klobuchar would kick into her mean girl mode and remind folks of what their government does for them.
For Mad Dog, two stories spring to mind, although these are not even the most current examples.
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| Dave Garroway |
Mad Dog is old enough to recall the summer terrors invoked by polio. When he was growing up the two things parents feared most in America was a nuclear war and polio, and of the two, the polio epidemics which tore through communities every summer was the most realized threat.
Swimming pools were closed, public spaces shuttered and everyone lived in fear.
The federal government through a novel approach, founded the March of Dimes to pay for rehabilitation, iron lungs and, most importantly, research into creating a vaccine for the virus. The work went on for 10 years and ultimately a government funded researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, supported through thick and thin by one of Franklin Roosevelt's hand picked men, came up with an effective vaccine.
You can say that private enterprise might have accomplished the same thing, being motivated by profit might have come up with a vaccine, but the fact is, no pharmaceutical company ever did, none seemed to think it was worth the huge investment, or none had the capacity, but for whatever reason, nobody but the government stepped up.
Dave Garroway was a TV personality, host of a morning TV show and some years after Jonas Salk's vaccine had vanquished polio, after the government push to get it tested and approved and distributed, he had the honor of introducing Dr. Salk at a banquet. He told the story of having thought about what he would say for weeks but he had come up with nothing which seemed adequate.
As he was putting on his bowtie for his tuxedo, his 10 year old son watched him, and knowing the tuxedo meant his father had something special that night, asked what the big deal was.
"Oh," Garroway said, "I'm going to introduce Jonas Salk tonight and it's only a couple of hours and I haven't a clue what to say. I mean, what can you say about Jonas Salk?"
"Who's Jonas Salk?" asked his son.
"He's the man who came up with the polio vaccine. He vanquished polio."
"But, Dad," the son asked, "What's polio?"
Garroway looked out over his audience two hours later and said, "Can you imagine any ten year old boy in America of our generation who would never have heard of polio?"
I would bet that's the best introduction Jonas Salk ever got.
And that was a triumph of government as complicated as the Manhattan project and it benefited far more living people on this planet.
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| Anthony Fauci, MD |
Then there was the Tony Fauci story: Tony Fauci, MD has been the head of the National of Institutes of Health the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease for almost 40 years. In the early 1980's when AIDS was ravaging the country, in particular the homosexual communities, it was his institute which got the job of figuring out what this virus was and how to treat it.
His NIAID funded and organized the lab work to identify the virus and his folks took care of AIDS patients at the Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
One day, Dr. Faucil arrived at Building 31 on the NIH campus and was confronted by a group of 30 demonstrators with picket signs and he looked at them curiously as he passed by and into the building.
When he got upstairs he asked his secretary who the demonstrators were and what they were protesting.
"Well, Dr. Fauci, they are a group called 'Act Up' and they are picketing and protesting you."
Fauci was dumstruck. He told his secretary to send someone down and get those people up to see him and he cleared out his biggest conference room to hold them.
The demonstrators were startled to find themselves invited in and amazed to be speaking with the famous, important and powerful Dr. Fauci himself, not some administrator or press secretary. But Tony Fauci had grown up in an apartment over his father's pharmacy in Bensonhurst and he had worked construction and actually built the medical library at the medical school he would later attend and he studied in that very library.
Nobody was beneath him. He wanted to hear the complaints.
"Nobody cares about AIDS," a protester told him. "It's a gay disease, sent to punish gays for their evil ways. It's not worth your time or spending government money on and we are dying. And nobody's doing a fucking thing about it and we pay taxes, too. And we are people."
"Well," Fauci replied. "This comes as great surprise to me. We are working long hours in a number of labs to identify the virus. And right across the street, you see that building? That's the Clinical Center. We've got a 40 bed intensive care unit over there, struck down by AIDS, and three shifts of nurses are coming to work every day to care for those patients. Some of those ladies have kids. They all know the risks but they come in every day. If you want to come across the street with me, I'll introduce you to the doctors and the nurses. Then you can tell me if you think nobody in this government cares about this disease, that nobody is trying to do anything about it."
A stunned silence filled the room and eventually someone got up and said, "Thank you, Dr. Fauci," and they left.
There are some people for whom no effort by their government is ever enough. They say they want the government to keeps its dirty hands off their Medicare and they say Social Security payments are too small.
But there are government employees at Walter Reed and at VA hospitals taking care of veterans who've had their legs blown off, government employees jumping into a vortex of swirling maelstrom during hurricanes to rescue sailors, government employees fighting forest fires, setting up shelters after floods with FEMA.
And mostly all you hear about them is complaints.
The fact is, if you have a President who sees nothing of value in what the government does, eventually this will become a self fulfilling prophesy.
It doesn't have to be this way.
There are a lot of good people who can do good things from government offices, if we only help them do it.
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