WHO WE ARE-First Senator Rod Wright finally gets convicted of voter fraud after five years of trial delays. Then this massive corruption case surrounding State Senator Ron Calderon and family is beginning to unfold before us. This is nothing new.
As the details of the Calderon scandal are elucidated, we will say and hear, over and over again, that this stuff has happened before and it’s just part of the culture. Or we will talk about the need to enact some law or require something that will act as a deterrent. Worse than that, you might hear people defend corruption, confusing personality with public good. Trading the good for the bad, so to speak, and this one didn’t do anything that these others blatantly got away with, or … so on.
But those are just the things we say to rationalize our refusal to demand more; more action from ourselves, from our neighbors, from our family, and from our government. These scandals should be enraging and we should judge our own inactions harshly.
But what is most likely, sadly, is that we will sink further into our jaded, cynical funk. And this negative outlook – albeit completely warranted – only functions as a lubricant for the corruption to perpetuate the system. And none of this will change until we stop letting them do it. Until then, our public self-servants will continue to exploit the system we have created.
Who is the public self-servant?
He is the political ambulance chasers who can seemlessly pivot from one adamant stance to the next as long as there is a crowd. She is the candidate who stumps for rigid and nonspecific ideology when the community needs specific solutions for real world problems. It’s not just the elected official lining his pockets with bribes in pay to play systems, but it’s also the one who capriciously jumps from one office to the next better thing before completing a term because it benefits his career.
The public self-servant games the system for maximum personal benefit, parlaying influence towards multiple options that build her own career and trades public stability for personal gain. He is the one who trucks heavily in rhetoric and lightly in substance.
We created the public self-servant, though. We did it through our complacency when we didn’t vote. Or when we didn’t research the candidate. Or when we relied on one news source, Fox News or MSNBC, to do our thinking for us. Or when we slid into rigid ideology and refused to challenge people from our own parties. We did it when we supported a candidate’s personality and refused to challenge that candidate to state, publicly, what her solutions are to our most profound problems. We did it when we succumbed to the theatrics of her ideological stance instead of demanding to hear specifics on how she will fix our economy.
As these scandals unfold before us, it’s prudent for us all to take stock of how often we’re wearing blinders. It’s appropriate for us to judge ourselves harshly for permitting that “politics as usual” catch-all rationalization to explain away the corruption around us. Where have you become complacent?
Nothing will ever change until we stop looking the other way, until we become diligent participants in the election process, until we remain involved in the government that we elect, or until we start puncturing through the glib answers we know in our gut is political bs. These are the actions we must start taking, for the shadows forming at the edge of our passivity are the breeding grounds for corruption.
I hold out hope for a government that serves its people. I refuse to accept that corruption is inevitable and you should do the same. Don’t shake your head knowingly when you read about Ron Calderon. Shake your head in horror and take to the streets. Refuse to sink into cynicism.
Only when we return to an era in which we demand that our public officials actually are steadfast community servants; only when real people demand to be taken seriously, and only when we as a community set aside our star-struck approach to our mayors and governors and Senators, only when we have the confidence to demand purity of character in our government, only then will we stop fostering the kind of corrupt environment public self-servants thrive within.
Until then, we should start setting up a corruption trial season at the end of every legislative session. That way we can streamline judicial resources and save the taxpayer a little money.
(Odysseus Bostick is a Los Angeles teacher and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. He writes The Bostick Report for CityWatch.)
-cw