The social contract

Letter from Slim Wolfe

Society - July 2006 - Colorado Central Magazine - No. 149 - Page 13
Copyright © 2006 by Slim Wolfe and Central Colorado Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
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Editors:

Once again George Sibley's column (June Colorado Central) touches on that mother of all topics, the social contract. Though I've taken the direction of independence (and near isolation) here in Central Colorado for the best part of thirty years, I grew up in New York City in the nineteen-fifties in a world full of social contract. Parks, schools, recreation facilities, health care, transportation, housing, in short, almost every aspect of life was the taken-for-granted right of every citizen rich or poor. I didn't have much concept of the private sector except when shopping, and there wasn't a lot of money for that at all. But it was good: apart from the noise and the crowds there was nothing wrong with life under the social contract. There were lots of options, too, because it was a large and well-developed system. Call it the workers paradise or call it the welfare state, it was the brainchild of progressive thinkers like Jacob Riis who saw the need to help immigrants and poor people keep their heads above water, for the good of the whole world.

[Cartoon from Slim Wolfe.]

This sort of social contract has been under attack now for several decades. People like Bush and Cheney never had to worry about a doctor bill and never lacked a place to swim or play ball; they instinctively think everyone in the world can and should come up with the means to install their own damned tennis courts and leave government to its more appropriate role of stimulating business. They've chanted this chant so loud that some people have started chanting it with them. Where's your pride, where's your ambition, they say, make your mark, take your share by hook or by crook (which is why we have many hookers and crooks among us).

Also in the June Colorado Central was a review of a book which described pre-Columbian America as extensively cultivated and civilized. We imagine a full sort of social contract among these first nations (recommended reading: The Royal Hunt of the Sun, by Plummer) and a contract with the natural ecosystem as well for the good of all. We imagine a world with some trade and commerce but without corporations. We imagine a social contract entitled people to a better standard of living than the extruded toys and extruded burgers which we've learned to choke down: a society of creative self-reliant people who nevertheless got together to care for the ones who fall out of favor with fortune.

Now we have become a world of numbers and number-mongers. We figure our social contract as dollars in a social security check, or dollars in an HMO account or voters in a district or viewers for a TV network time slot. And so we have evolved a contract with numbers, instead of a social contract. And we build our little hideouts or our big hideouts way up in the hills, because a social contract seems a bit like a moot point in a world of bogus prosperity where nothing ever satisfies and everything needs replaced.

 Slim Wolfe
 Villa Grove

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