After Robert Redford died last month I decided to re-watch one of my many favorite movies of his. It’s a lesser known and thought of movie that didn’t do all that well at the box office, but it still has legs almost 25 years after it came out.
It’s called The Last Castle. And it inspired the name of this month’s blog post.
I won’t waste your time re-telling the story or risk ruining the ending at all, but the overall moral of the story (redemption), and one scene in particular, are so relevant to our country today.
In the scene I’m referring to, a person is made to carry heavy stones from one side of a prison yard to the other as punishment.
When he finally gets done, thinking it’s all over, he gets told to now move them all back to where they were originally. At the end of the day, no progress was made, but he’s exhausted.
In a similar way, our country’s forward progress today is like this, and it’s why the American people are fed up with both parties.
For decades now, each time the Republicans have re-taken power their main goal has been to simply undo what prior Democratic administrations did. And then when the Democrats get back into power they try to undo the GOP damage and rebuild what was lost.
All we are doing is moving rocks from one side of the prison yard to another. Digging a hole and refilling it in. Building a structure and tearing it down. No visible progress. And the American people and the world at large are worse off because of this dynamic.
It used to be that the shared goal of liberals and conservatives was forward progress, and the main difference being one of speed–liberals wanted to move faster, conservatives slower.
Not anymore, and not for a long time.
Government is a tool, nothing more. It can be wielded to do good, or to do bad. It is up to the user.
The debilitating effect on the American people when one party spends all its efforts while in control of that tool is to use it to undo everything the other party has erected, is to make the people lose confidence in the tool itself.
And make no mistake about it, that is the current goal of the Republican party…make the American people lose confidence in government as a potential source of improving their lives.
That’s what this current and all previous government shutdowns have been about at their very core…see how long it takes for the American people to really notice what the government does for them on a day to day basis and see if they are personally affected or miss it…and if they are affected enough to protest strongly enough to get it back working again.
Until we break up the duopoly and give voters more choices that through competition force the Democrats and Republicans to be the best versions of themselves, we will not replace this cycle of moving the rocks from one side of the yard to the other.
For it is only through cooperation that we can repair the deep cracks in our republic and together build a stronger and shared foundation that will endure for another 250 years.
Perry Waag 