"The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves."
William Emery Channing

We have come somehow to believe that government should provide us with what we need, whatever that may be. Nonsense. No government in the world, including ours, has ever been wise enough or generous enough to make such provision. It isn't even their business to do so, at least not in my view. It is instead, the business of each of us as citizens, to make sure they do not provide us with government by special interest and we've done a remarkably poor job of that in recent decades.

I would draw a parallel between small business and small government. The economic strength of this country, the innovation, invention and commitment to see products and services through to success, has always been anchored in small business. Eighty percent of our national production comes from these small enterprises. Huge corporations lurch about like elephants, profitable only by market-share and subverted by their layers upon layers of "management." IBM is eclipsed by Microsoft, a firm whose product didn't even exist a short time ago and now Microsoft feels new small firms snapping at its too-large heels. Until recently, size was a guarantee of success, but no longer and the same is true of government.

In Illinois, foster-care for children is rocked by periodic scandal and the per child cost of that care approaches $60,000.00. Eighty percent of inmates in Illinois prisons were once in the foster-care program. And yet a concerned mother of two, a professor of child development, has developed a community center of foster-care, building upon what she sees as the values of small town closeness. She patched together funding in the Illinois legislature and has a working program, whose early results are so positive that six other states are asking for information and looking to similar programs. It's a beginning.

In Chicago, residents of HUD subsidized housing have petitioned and received the opportunity to run their own building. Rent collection is up, vandalism and gang terrorism is down, maintenance and peace of mind is at an all-time high. Another small beginning and HUD may turn over ownership, relieving themselves of the frustration and cost of a program they're poorly equipped to manage from Washington.

In cities and counties across the nation, budget cuts that would usually signal a decline in services are being creatively met by alternatives. In some cases, former public employees are forming private companies to bid for service contracts, reducing costs, improving service and increasing their wages. Some solutions fail, others prosper, but the failures are as useful as the successes, showing what doesn't work before it becomes cast in bureaucratic stone. Small successes, small failures, all building toward a more economic and useful delivery of government.

Examples of government-citizen impasse are many, one of the better examples that of the approach of a range-war in the western states. History and generations of use are faced off against new federal law, as cattle ranchers are denied access to government land essential to their economy. There are middle grounds, useful and equitable middle grounds that preserve national lands and serve local needs, but the polarization on both sides is headed toward further confrontation. Intransigence always leads to a hardening of positions.

Yet I believe most firmly that answers cannot and will not be found at the top, but must be fed from the broad base upward, to as high a level as good sense and practice will allow.

That requires good people to stand up rather than walk away disillusioned by what their government is not meant to do. It is a mistake to believe that because we are a democracy, our best interests automatically will be served by some vague power from above. It is a mistake to believe that as individuals we are powerless, but certainly true that we must present a case that pulls others to us.

The government of your town and county and state and country is citizen-driven as well as special-interest driven and it has always been driven by a few, but is available to be driven by any few. Martin Luther King, Jr. began with a few and so did the good professor from Illinois.

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