Historian Claire C. Robertson taught many of us the importance of Sharing the Same Bowl in 1984 when she published the results of her study of women and the history of socioeconomic structures in Accra, Ghana. I learned the significance of eating from a shared plate during a too brief homestay with a very kind family in Dakar, Senegal. Those daily meals changed my sense of what it means to be in a community and how a social contract is incomplete until all in the community are liberated from anarchy.
In this presidential campaign season, the anarchists are speaking loudly about states’ rights and about gun rights and about small-government as if we are all living on the frontier with Pecos Bill. This anarchy may lead to fascism and many of us know this.
What too many are forgetting is the fascism of Mussolini with its patria potestas and anti-union sentiments. While fantasies of a neo-Pecos Bill Mussolini ride across the range of the blogosphere, I hope the anarchists take time to read Robert. C. Davis’ Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800. There is a direct correlation between the increase in the size of the US government and the increase in white Americans’ safety in the Ottoman Empire where they, like James Leander Cathcart, were often captured and sold into slavery. Anarchy and small US government were dangerous for white Americans.
This same kind of small-government anarchy results in too little money being spent on water infrastructure in the United States.
CBS This Morning showed the world that inside the United States there are people who benefit less from U.S. water technology than the millions of people who have been helped by U.S. government assistance overseas. CBS also included a story about the heatwave in several states near the Dine/Navajo nation. For many of the Dine people, their water cups are dry for about half of the month. California Governor Jerry Brown’s directives about water conservation and Mother Nature’s wildfires are warning us that millions of Americans are at risk of sharing a dry cup of water with the Dine.
Rather than take my word for it, you can read more at the Community Water Center.
I’m not sure what kind of callousness allows us tolerate dry cups of water for the Dine. Small-government anarchists in California and other states may change their minds as their water sources go dry.
Unless we apologize, empathize and finance massive water infrastructure development soon, we may learn that we can’t follow Pecos Bill Mussolini to another frontier in an undiscovered verdant valley. Rather, we should direct our national and state governments to invest on our behalf in a long drink of water at the Empathy Saloon inside the space of the American social contract.
profmrobinson 