Government is bureaucracy.

We like to pretend like they are separate things, because that fits better in our hierarchical naked beach ape minds. Goverment, we like to think, is that top layer where our political alphas do their important political stuff that we, the rest of the monkey troupe. need them to do in order to keep us safe.

Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is that annoying stuff with people shuffling pieces of paper around and making you go through a bunch of seemingly needless steps just to get your goddamned driver’s license renewed.

But that’s a false separation. A bogus duality. Government is bureaucracy, bureaucracy is government. Government is made of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the government. There is no government that is not also bureaucracy.

It is easy – childishly easy – to forget this. We make a game of pretending that the parts of government we like are “the government” and the parts we don’t like are “the bureaucracy”, but you just have to compare maps between two random citizens to realize just how petty and arbitrary a distinction that is.

Every part of government is a part of a vast bureaucracy. The solider in the field, the cop on the beat, the road worker repaving a section of sidewalk, and the middle management interdepartmental liaison are all equally bureaucrats. The fact that they are at the lowest level of the structure, the parts you can actually see working, doesn’t make any of them more important or less a part of government any more that the wheel of the car is more important than the engine because that’s the part we can see and interact with. It is all government.

We Canadians seem to have a somewhat better grip on this than the Americans. After all, they have “truth, justice, and the American Way^[1]” and we have “peace, order, and good government”. We Canadians are, however dimly, aware of the fact that we are the government and the government is us. Whatever level you are dealing with (national, provincial, municipal, school), we remain aware that the bureaucrats we are talking to are fellow Canadians, just like us, and so we feel the same obligation to deal with them in a polite and reasonable fashion as they feel towards us.

Not so down south. Americans are constantly at war with their own anti-authoritarian oppositional/defiant nature, and so they are compelled to divide everything into two camps, Us versus Them. The Little Guy versus the Government. Republicans versus Democrats. Coke versus Pepsi. Great Taste versus Less Filling.

But we are talking about degrees of the same disease. Every democracy struggles with these same false dichotomy these days. The Baby Boom generation cannot stand to be told what to do, no matter how righteous the order. So they reactivate their faded memories of being anti-authoritarian rebels and pretend like it is still Us Versus The System, even though they are the system now and have lost all rights to be considered the underdog.

I guess they never learned to be responsible. Responsibility, after all, restricts freedom and is therefore evil. Nothing else is relevant. Any arguments that they are being irresponsible meet with “LA LA LA, I CAN’T HEAR YOU”, or its equivalent.

So even though they are in power, they are The Man, and they are The System, they still behave like spoiled teenagers for whom everything is optional (or should be) optional, including taxation, law, government, and anything else they don’t like.

Global Warming is going to kill us all? LA LA LA! The wealthy are destroying democracy? Whatever, dude, I’ll be fine so who gives a shit. The police are shooting black people, like, a lot? Nah, we killed racism, everything’s cool. Whatever they have to believe in order to justify doing whatever feels good or is fun to them, they will believe it.

They did it when they were hippies telling themselves having lots of sex and taking lots of drugs will somehow bring about world peace, they did it again when they decided getting jobs and going corporate wasn’t really selling out, they did it a third time when they convinced themselves “greed is good” in the Eighties, and they have done it again now that they are the system and the power but they don’t feel like taking on the responsibility that clearly entails.

Nope, we’re still the put-upon victims of a tyrannical System that only wants to keep us down by doing the worst thing possible in the entire catalog of human sins, making us less rich and more poor. We literally cannot think of anything worse and there is literally no possible justification for it, ever, period.

And this will remain true no matter how many fun wars we vote for. We don’t have to pay for that, The Government does. The Government has unlimited amounts of money from…. I don’t know, somewhere… and therefor can do whatever the hell we want it to do without having to charge us one red cent for it. They only take our money because they are big greedy meanies who like hurting people and hate success!

That’s what we have to believe in order to continue being selfish, callous, and irresponsible, so that’s what we believe.

It’s high time we make these motherfuckers grow up at last. You can’t always have things your way. Some things remain true no matter how much you dislike them. There are lots of things that you still have to do even after your tantrum. There is no Great Depression generation to be the responsible parent and clean up after you any more.

You’re in charge. Behave yourselves. Take a good hard look at reality and deal with life as it is, even all the parts that suggest, however mildly, that sometimes you should not, in fact, be allowed to do whatever the hell you want.

It is high time you admitted to yourself that you are the grownups now, and it’s up to you to clean up your own messes.