Audrey Pietrucha

Our dystopian world

Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it's not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way. But our minds move in a dozen different directions. We can't be confined to one way of thinking, and that terrifies our leaders. It means we can't be controlled. And it means that no matter what they do, we will always cause trouble for them. - Tobias, Divergent

At first the movie Divergent appears to be a dystopian fantasy, a story about a world where people are divided into factions and are, for the most part, content to stay within them. The five factions - Dauntless, Abnegation, Erudite, Amity and Candor – each represent personality traits for which their members have tested and been found to have an aptitude. Dauntless are brave, Abnegation are selfless, Erudite are bookish and intelligent, Amity are kind and peace-loving and Candor are honest and truth seeking. The trouble is, some members of the society do not fit neatly into any one category. They are Divergent.

Though the world of Divergent is fictional, it contains obvious parallels to our own society. What is astonishing is that we allow ourselves to be sorted into factions, even volunteer for placement. We have our political factions, our racial factions, our religious factions. We line up behind our favorite sports teams and taunt our rivals’ fans, we feel superior or inferior based on which schools we attend or which stores we shop. Southerners aren’t as good as Northerners who are as good as New Englanders who aren’t as good as Vermonters. Like amoeba we seem able to continually divide and separate ourselves. Naturally, whichever groups in which we find ourselves tend to be the better ones.

While this human tendency to divide into groups or factions or clans, whichever term applies, is damaging and limiting to us as individuals, it is devastating to our society on a political level. Once we have identified ourselves as belonging to one faction we often stop thinking about issues and allow our “leaders” to do the thinking for us. Thus, when a Republican president runs up huge budget deficits the members of his supposedly fiscally conservative political faction are ominously silent. When Democrat president expands policies that allow American citizens to be spied upon, his normally civil liberties-loving minions see, hear and speak no evil. This is extremely helpful to those in power but ruinous to a system of government which requires an informed and engaged electorate.

Equally destructive is the tendency of politicians to take cover behind their faction of choice whenever they are questioned about their policies or actions. So someone like Eric Holder, whose stint as U.S. Attorney General has been fraught with bad decisions, cries racism when he is questioned on them. In our group-identity-driven political atmosphere people aren’t allowed to disagree with those who are different without being accused of hating the entire faction.

Divergence is extremely dangerous.

Perhaps the worst consequence of our herd mentality, though, is how we treat those who express viewpoints outside what the majority, or often a very vocal minority, considers acceptable thought. Someone like Andrew Cuomo, who is supposed to serve as governor to all New Yorkers, can actually say those he defines as “extreme conservatives,” including people who are pro-life and pro-second amendment, have no place in New York State and receive little backlash from his fellow “liberals.” Though we give lip-service to the glories of intellectual diversity and the free exchange of ideas, in reality dissenting nails are quickly hammered down when they dare to pop up. Physical hammers are unnecessary, of course, since name-calling words like “wacko,” “nut job” and “extremist” suffice.

Divergent makes the point that the traits that define the factions, and many traits besides, are part of human nature and no matter how much we try to isolate and extinguish them, they will remain. We are not one dimensional. We are all, actually, Divergent and capable of developing a myriad of character traits.

Our task is to cultivate and magnify those that contribute to morally and culturally healthy individuals and societies.

I think we’ve made a mistake ...We’ve all started to put down the virtues of the other factions in the process of bolstering our own.  I don’t want to do that.  I want to be brave, and selfless, and smart, and honest, and kind . . .

So should we all.

Audrey Pietrucha is a member of Vermonters for Liberty and a proud Divergent. She can be reached at vermontliberty@gmail.com.

Reflections on the Tea Party movement

A couple of weeks ago, on February 19 to be exact, an important anniversary passed virtually unnoticed. It was the five-year anniversary of the day on which ordinary working American began their political education when they rallied behind Rick Santelli’s cry for a modern-day Tea Party.

Certainly Santelli did not know what he unleashed when he accused the government of promoting bad behavior through the “Homeowners Affordability and Stability” act (gotta love the newsspeak-inspired names of legislation – Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would be proud). In reality he did not start the protest movement that would become the Tea Party, he merely named it. The concerns, the frustration, and the anger that eventually exploded on April 15 of 2009 had been bubbling and churning below the surface since the previous September, when George W. Bush decreed some banks were “too big to fail” and we had to “abandon free market principles to save the free market system” (score another one for the Ministry of Truth).

So Tax Day became a rallying point for a group of people who were tired of watching the fruits of their labor confiscated and redistributed to those who had been foolish or reckless or generally irresponsible with other peoples’ money. Their anger was not directed so much against other Americans or even the corporations that benefitted from Washington’s calculated largess but Washington itself. It had become clear that the principles that had guided the United States from its inception, the carefully-crafted balance of freedom and responsibility, had been usurped by a corrupt system where fiscal populism and crony capitalism ensured the survival of the political class and the rest of us could be damned.

So, naïve bumpkins that they were, the members of the Tea Party movement went to work. They organized rallies, painted signs, lined up speakers, bought their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and boned up on the Constitution. Then they rallied by the millions to show the politicians they were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

They expected a fair hearing, though not without pushback from the politicians and their lackeys in the media. They were, after all, a threat to the status quo. They didn’t expect to be called Astroturf by a woman with so much plastic in her cheeks and forehead it could have covered the field at Yankee Stadium. They didn’t expect to be called vulgar names and be accused of racism and stupidity. And they sure didn’t expect to be on the receiving end of so much hatred and vitriol from their fellow citizens, for whose rights and freedom they were fighting.

That is when their real education began. They learned that Washington’s tentacles reach far and wide and deep. They are in academia, industry, for-profits and non-profits, state and local government. They hold our pension fund, our health insurance, and our safety nets. Far too many of us are somehow tied to and/or dependent on a federal government that needs us to need them. Our illusion of being a free people is just that – an illusion. Such a dependent people can never be said to be free.

What is even more frightening is that the coming generations are already ensnared. The debt the Tea Party protested against has only grown larger over the past five years, to where it now stands at $17 trillion, a number is so large it triggers a collective eye glaze-over. Welcome to the world, baby American – your share of our nation’s debt now stands at $55,000.

The Tea Party was right to be concerned and to point out how treacherous is the path on which we’re heading. But they are also human and they got tired. They got tired of being attacked, of being called names, of being sneered at by the disingenuous among us who hid their own stake in Washington’s continued fiscal folly. They got tired of having their common-sense message distorted and turned into something it was not.

Those that started the Tea Party have mostly retired from civic life. They are still active, but their struggle is quieter and more personal. They’re taking care of their families and businesses, getting their own houses in order. They are demonstrating alternatives to government dependence and trying to build new infrastructures within their communities that will hold up should the fiscal crises they anticipate comes to pass.

Some still hope they can change the system for the better. They call and write their representatives. They offer financial and moral support to candidates who understand government’s only true obligation is to ensure personal and economic freedom and a sound economic and debt-free future. Sometimes they run for office themselves.

There are stalwarts out there who keep up the good fight. They have never lost sight that this is a battle for future generations and the future of the American experiment. They have learned what and what not to expect. They expect to eventually be proven right. They certainly never expect an apology.

Audrey Pietrucha is a member of Vermonters for Liberty. She dedicates this column to those who continue to fight the good fight.

A Serious Look at Poverty

Audrey Pietrucha

T’is the season when many of us are swimming in the sea of excess. A few weeks after frantically trying to find the perfect gifts for friends and family members who already have everything they need we’re back at the stores buying plastic bins to hold our holiday haul. After stuffing ourselves with cookies and bounteous meals we’re sucking in our stomachs and promising to lose those extra pounds. Some of us are swearing off alcohol or cigarettes or chocolate and vowing to live lives that are both simpler and healthier.

So Pope Francis’ recent remarks on global poverty have provoked emotional responses from people on both side of the wealth divide. Both the pontiff’s remarks and the issues they address are nuanced and complex and deserve similar serious treatment.

We should begin with acknowledgement of the good news in the global economic situation: worldwide poverty is on the decline. Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz of the Brookings Institution have studied the global economy and found the “rise of emerging economies has led to a dramatic fall in global poverty.” They estimate between 2005 and 2010 the total number of poor people around the world fell by nearly half a billion, from over 1.3 billion in 2005 to under 900 million in 2010.

“Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history,” Chandy and Gertz said. “Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.”

Poverty does, of course, still exist and in greater numbers than with which any feeling human being is comfortable. Its causes on both a national and global scale are many and diverse. It is not wholly the result of laziness on the part of the poor or greed and selfishness on the part of the rich. That some of those traits exist at both ends of the personal economic spectrum is true, but so do the traits of generosity, compassion and industriousness. A society is comprised of individuals and each brings his or her own personal circumstances and responses to life experience to the economic table. Some of these reactions and actions will serve to uplift and strengthen both the individual and society, some will tear down. A large part of our challenge is to identify and encourage positive outcomes.

So Pope Francis’ admonition to world leaders to become involved in the redistribution of wealth was disappointingly one-dimensional. It was also most likely the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Time and again, studies indicate it is economic freedom, not government control, that best alleviates poverty and creates prosperous societies.

For almost 20 years Canada’s Fraser Institute has been studying the global economy and releasing an index of world economic freedom. The index measures the size and scope of government, adherence to the rule of law, access to sound money, freedom to trade internationally and the regulation of credit, labor and business. The institute has identified four cornerstones of economic freedom, which are: 

·        Personal choice rather than collective choice

·        Voluntary exchange coordinated by markets rather than allocation via the political process

·        Freedom to enter and compete in markets

·        Protection of persons and their property from aggression by others

Nations whose governments honor the values embodied in the four cornerstones are consistently most prosperous while nations with less freedom are also least prosperous. What’s more, the poor in the economically free nations are far better off financially than the middle class in nations with repressive economic systems.

In his remarks Pontiff warned against “a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power,” but then seemed to relinquish that power to the state, which he said was “charged with vigilance for the common good.” Centuries of wars, man-caused famines and other atrocities bring into question the state’s ability to discern what is actually good for the people. Placing economic power in the hands of those whose actions have proven they do not deserve it seems the pinnacle of “crude and naïve trust.” Haven’t volumes of history as well as uncomfortably recent scandals taught us that? Whether it is the targeting of people and political groups by the IRS, the massive collection of personal data by the NSA and even New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s possible involvement in punishing political enemies don’t we have daily proof that for too many of our so-called leaders politics is a game of chess and we are the pawns?

Political power and economic power are all too often one and the same. Undesirable economic circumstances that are often blamed on capitalism are most often the result of collusion between those seeking political favor and those dispensing it. A market that is dependent on government involvement is not free by any means. Governments should limit their roles to protecting people’s rights to interact and trade with each other peacefully. Power of any variety should be spread among as many people as possible, with individuals retaining the most with regards to the governance of their own lives.

Audrey Pietrucha is on the executive board of Vermonters for Liberty. She can be reached at vermontliberty@gmail.com.