For progressives looking for a counterpoint to the hypocritical, anti-government mantra of the right, here’s a great source: Government is Good, a website offering “an unapologetic defense of a vital institution.”
Douglas J. Amy, professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, created the site and describes it this way:
This website is a response to this one-sided, distorted, and misleading depiction of government. It makes the case that government – despite its flaws – plays a valuable and indispensable role in promoting the public good. Most government programs are working well and are actually improving the lives of all Americans in innumerable ways.
The site includes myth-busting sections such as “A Day in Your Life with Government,” “What Americans Really Think About Government,” and “Unsung Government Heroes,” a reasoned and impassioned defense of the government workers–too often vilified as “bureaucrats”–whose mostly unnoticed work enhances our quality of life in everyday ways.
We Americans need to get over this knee-jerk antagonism toward our government and its employees. We need to acknowledge that our public agencies and our public servants have a vital role to play in society, protecting us from the numerous risks and threats that surround us in a modern world. And we need to ungrudgingly pay the taxes that make this important work possible.
The work of these public heroes often goes unappreciated because it goes unseen. When a firefighter saves someone from a burning building, it is front-page news. But when the everyday heroes in our government save us from harm, few people notice.
Why? Because when they do their jobs well, nothing happens to us. We don’t get sick from a disease, we aren’t poisoned by the water we drink, we aren’t electrocuted by a faulty appliance, and so on. With nothing bad happening, it is easy to go throughout our lives ignorant of how they are being made much safer by government workers.
Definitely worth checking out.