Notes on Camp – by Bill McKibben – The Crucial Years

Source: Notes on Camp – by Bill McKibben – The Crucial Years

…On the other hand, we understand a lot more about why you shouldn’t go in a lake with blue-green algae, and so we both close down beaches and try to clean up the pollution that causes it.

Camp’s not a perfect analogy for society, of course. Most of us are adults, and at least theoretically better equipped to make our own decisions, and the thing we’re most bent on maximizing is not fun but wealth (probably a mistake, but there it is). Still, unless we’re true libertarians we acknowledge the need to address risk and opportunity in some sensible fashion. Which we’re not doing at the moment. The huge budget bill that finally passed last week is a perfect example.

The Republicans who passed it—and this was an entirely Republican operation, stem to stern—clearly wanted to maximize the wealth of rich people: the most affluent one percent of families will receive a trillion dollars in new income. (This is the camp equivalent of giving almost all the s’mores to one or two kids). In return they were willing to embrace a wide variety of risks: Not just the risks posed by a higher deficit in a time when we’re not at war or in recession, but the risk that comes from $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid. That will cause rural hospitals to close, for instance, making health care much harder to access and in the process surely endangering large numbers of lives. Or the 20 percent reduction in SNAP funding for food assistance, which will clearly raise the risk of people going hungry.

The only risk they really seemed to care about was violent crime by immigrants—that was the justification for tripling the ICE budget so we can have a quantum increase in the number of guys with neck gaiters shoving people into vans….