The Roles of Gubment 2: Time After Time

In terms of time, government has two roles. One is to do what other parts of society can't or won't do to protect and make better the future.

Especially these days, corporations won't look beyond the quarterly report. And while government policymakers often won't look past the next election, it falls to them (and the unsung, often stereotyped career professionals within all branches of government, as well as citizen advocates) to transcend the nearest fears and opportunities to do what is in the best interests of the country and the planet long-term.

This is embedded in nearly every speech that President Obama makes, and is explicit in his epigrammatic statement from earlier this year: "Our future shouldn't be shaped by what's best for our politics; our politics should be shaped by what's best for our future." But the principle is stated most profoundly in the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois: “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come.”

Though the Great Law is hundreds of years old, perhaps a thousand years old, it is still a novel concept among us. It is this future orientation that is our only hope for getting ahead of the curve of the Climate Crisis, or even responding in a timely way to its effects.

The second role of government in terms of time is to respond to the needs of the moment that no other entity can effectively address. For me, this function is summarized in something Harry Hopkins said to FDR about the need to address the Depression with policies of immediate effect: "People don't eat in the long-term. They eat every day."

Government must often respond to the needs of both kinds of time. The health insurance reform law, the last aspects of which will be signed today, responds to a need of now, and to the specific failure of insurance companies to meet the need. The effects of the law will occur over time, with some provisions beginning this year, and others in a few years.

It is perhaps evidence of the limitation of our thinking that we see this as addressing needs long-term. On the one hand, there is the somewhat laughable attempt to cost it out over decades, as if the world was economically and socially predictable. Such estimates are informed guesses, and if we were sane about time, we would admit that we need to respond to the unforeseen or to changes over time. But in this toxic political environment, everything is a political issue, especially when the rich suspect they might not get richer fast enough--this year.

And while the precise effects of global heating--its manifestations in event and in time--can't be predicted, at least using the tools we usually apply, the outlines of the long-range physical effects are about as certain as we ever get. So chances are that in the future--perhaps 10 or 20 years, perhaps 50, almost certainly in 70--the changes in the U.S. healthcare system so painfully made, and still so controversial, will seem puny and inadequate. And if we are in the full grip of Climate Cataclysm, pretty much irrelevant.

So I see this more as a response to the needs of the present, and for perhaps a generation, than really for the future. But that's okay. Because people need health care every day.