We’re approaching the ‘find out’ phase

A popular phrase among the younger generations today goes like this:

“Mess around and find out.”

We’ve cleaned up this phrase to make it printable and, consequently, less alarming to readers whose tolerance of alarm has been severely tested in recent weeks. We’re sure you can guess which word was substituted, and what the actual word is.

Essentially, the phrase invokes a sense of karma. It means that actions have consequences. But even further, it specifically warns that actions made with knowing, arrogant disregard for their consequences are likely to blow up in your face (the “find out” part of the phrase).

Many Americans who thought it would be fun to mess around are, unfortunately, about to find out.

As the barrage of monumental, life-altering decisions continues to flood the nation from wholly undemocratic actions in Washington – whether through the president’s vague and overreaching executive orders, or through arbitrary funding decisions made by an unelected billionaire with unfettered access to the nation’s data – people who have cheered on this chaos as a panacea to what they view as ineffective government bloat are about to realize just how important many of those government programs actually are.

The resources being targeted, or at least caught up in the haphazard approach being taken to rein in “wasteful” spending, are the ones that help people with low incomes come closer to meeting the cost of living. In our communities, this is the work of agencies like the Comprehensive Community Action Program, West Bay Community Action, and Tri-County Community Action which administers such basics as heating assistance, workforce development, and dental care.

CCAP, whose reach into the lives of 44,000 people in Cranston, Warwick and three smaller communities nearby, also includes Head Start, the federally funded early-childhood program that supports school readiness for infants, toddlers and preschool-aged kids from low-income families – a program whose casual destruction would do nothing for Rhode Island’s future.

It is no secret that government has long had a public relations problem in not being able to convey effectively how the money we pay in taxes goes to things that actually help people in our communities. But these kinds of local service organizations are the backbone of a system that produces so much assistance for the money we invest in it.

Undoubtedly, there is waste and fat that can be trimmed from any budget, never mind one as gigantic as the United States of America’s. But what we are experiencing now is a real-time lesson in why a foundational civics education is so important. The one area where a centralized government is truly necessary is in providing services to individuals who need them. Not for profit, but because it’s the moral thing to do. Because nobody else will.

If things continue trending this way and the government’s role in helping people who need help is slowly suffocated, it’s not just the needy who will find out. It will be all of us.