Why I Work for the Common Good

The organization I work for has been making the news.  Not in a good way.

For the record, I live in the same house I’ve lived in since 2000, long before I went to work for SCAP, well in sight of the sewer treatment plant and near a recent sheriff involved homicide.  When I went to work for SCAP, I went to work for an ideal called the Continuum of Care.  I’ll talk about the CoC in my next post but for now I want to focus on why I work for the public.

Why do I work for the whole and not the part? Because everything is connected. It seems dead dumb stupid simple to me: Poison anywhere ends up in the drinking water.

A lot of people have the idea that life is all about money. Well, anyone who knows me knows that’s not the case with me. Everything for me is about the simple fact that we are human, creation is magnificent and we have brains and opposable thumbs. Those facts blow my fucking mind every day. There’s so much we can and could do. If only we would.

That commonality, those unique and amazing and incredible qualities and gifts of humanness, makes it so that it should be us against the elements; us against cancer and especially, us against our own stupidity and violence.  It should be us not me and mine.

And so I don’t focus much on what’s good for one–I try to focus on what is good for all, on those things we all share (which is pretty much everything) and how and in what ways we can bring more equity to pass.  I do not believe in the philosophy that it’s a dog-eat-dog world or that I should look out for number one.  I think we should look out for one another.  I do not believe that life is heartless and cold and vicious.  People can be but life is very giving and supportive.  Life has given me reasoning and strength and eyes to see.  Life gives me what I need: food and the ability to create the things I need to live.

It’s a complicated world we live in, these days. Rules and regulations have made it so no one is trusted and no one needs to tell the truth anymore.  Technicalities and the letter of the law will win out over what is right and good and moral and ethical almost every single time.  What can you do about that? Well, you can ask yourself that question. That’s a healthy start.