Robert Heinlein: Take Back Your Government!

I am puzzled by persons who take exception to the first proposition and seem to believe that crookedness is commoner than honesty. I can see how a citizen too long exposed to a corrupt machine might come to think the whole world is dishonest, but I am afraid that when I hear a man complain that everybody is crooked it makes me suspect that he himself is dishonest, especially if he complains that an honest man can't make a living in his line of business. I have met crooks, of course, but for every dishonest man I have met dozens, scores, of men so honest it hurt, both in and out of politics.

Any banker can confirm this. Ask your banker how many good checks come into the bank for every bad check. The figures will give you a warm glow of pleasure.

However, the occasional crook will band together with his kind and take your government away from you if you let him. It is very soothing to the conscience to tell yourself that, after all, you can't do anything to change the sorry state of things. It is much easier to sit in your living room, skim the headlines, and then make bitter remarks about those no-good crooks in the city hall, or the state capital, or Washington, and to complain about how they pay no attention to the welfare of the ordinary citizen (meaning yourself) than it is to put on your hat, go out in your neighborhood, and round up a few votes.

What do you expect for free? Chimes? If you wanted to round up a big order of yard goods, you wouldn't expect to accomplish it with your feet on your desk. This is just as important. Or have you forgotten that income tax form you made out? And your nephew who died at Okinawa because you let some senile congressman stay in office rather than bother with politics?1

Why should the average citizen bother with politics? Why touch the dirty business? Isn't politics loaded up with crooks you wouldn't want to eat with and crackpots you wouldn't want to have in your house? "Loaded" is hardly the word, but you will find plenty of each and they will almost drive you nuts. Besides that, and worse, your respectable friends - people who wouldn't be caught dead in a political club - will assume that you are in it for what you can get out of it They will be very sure of it, for that is the only reason their peanut heads can imagine!

Then why bother? Why expose yourself to bad companions and snide remarks simply to make a single-handed attempt to clean the Augean stables, to bail the ocean, to clear the forest?

Because you are needed. Because the task is not hopeless.

Democracy is normally in perpetual crisis. It requires the same constant, alert attention to keep it from going to pot that an automobile does when driven through downtown traffic. If you do not yourself pay attention to the driving, year in and year out, the crooks, or scoundrels, or nincompoops will take over the wheel and drive it in a direction you don't fancy, or wreck it completely.

When you pick yourself up out of the wreckage, you and your wife and your kids, don't talk about what "They" did to you. You did it, compatriot, because you preferred to sit in the back seat and snooze. Because you thought your taxes bought you a bus ticket and a guaranteed safe arrival, when all your taxes bought you was a part ownership in ajoint enterprise, on a share-the-cost and share-the-driving plan.

But the crisis is more than usually acute this year, the traffic is thicker, the curves more blind, the traffic signals less reliable, and there are a lot of places where the pavement is out which have not been marked on any map. More than ever your own welfare demands that you be alert and responsible.

Do you favor peacetime conscriptions? How did your congressman vote on it? Have you got any sons under twenty-one? Should the budget be balanced on a pay-as-you-go plan? If so, are you willing to vote to raise your own taxes? Or would you rather cut the budget for the army, the navy, and for veterans' benefits? Is there some other way to do it?

Should coal miners be forbidden to strike? Can you mine coal with bayonets? What would your rent be in a free market? Or are you still sleeping on a borrowed couch? When will a home be built for you and your kids? Can you afford it when it is built, if ever? Does your town have a building code which prevents the use of new materials and new construction methods? How do you feel about a loan to Great Britain? To France? To Russia? Are you willing to go on rationing to keep Germans from starving? How long should the occupation of Japan continue? Why? How did your congressman vote on FEPC? Do you know what FEPC is? How does it affect you?

The Filipinos become independent this year - should we let Philippine sugar in duty free? Do you live in the Colorado sugar beet country? Is a Senate filibuster a legitimate defense of states' rights, or a piece of tyranny? Should an oil man be in charge of military and naval oil reserves? Was Secretary Fall an oil operator? Does it make any difference?

ShouJd we insist that Russia give us free access and uncensored news reports so that we will know what she is up to? Is it worth fighting about? How about the Big Five Veto power? Does it make for peace or war?

Should Russia get out of Iran? Should Britain get out of Egypt? Should we get out of Korea? Are the three cases parallel? Or very different? Is a Manchurian communist the same thing as a Brooklyn communist? Why? Why not? Should a sharecropper be a Republican or a Democrat? Should a stockholder be a Democrat or a Republican? What is the American Way of Life? Does it mean the same thing on the Main Line as it does on Skid Row?

Are you sure about that last answer? Aren't we all in the same boat? Will an atomic bomb discriminate between bank account-or party labels?

Now we are getting down to cases. All the other problems were of the simple, easy sort that we have blundered our way through, not too badly, for the past hundred and seventy years.

We have a double-edged crisis this year, more acute on both its edges than any we have ever faced before, more acute, even, than Pearl Harbor, or the terrible War between the States.

The first crisis is political and economic. Our way of life is being challenged by a revolutionary upsurge in all corners of the globe. We can meet it with hysteria, persecution, and a new isolationism, or we can define our way of life in action and defend it by practical accomplishment. An American who is well housed, well fed, and holding a good job is poor pickings for an agitator. But let him miss seven meals -

The second crisis is amorphous but of even more deadly danger. We have entered the Atomic Era - but we are not yet used to the idea.

Have you read the Smyth Report?3

Do you know what the Smyth Report is? It is the War

Department's report on the atom bomb and is titled Atomic Energy for Military Purposes by H.D. Smyth. It is available in any bookstore and most newsstands at $1.25. It is dull reading but quite understandable and is easily the most important document to the human race since the Sermon on the Mount.

I won't try to tell you what it should mean to you. That's up to you. You are a free American citizen, for a while yet, at least. With good luck you should live another five or ten years. Whether or not you and your kids live longer than that depends on how you interpret the Smyth Report. But you must interpret it for yourself- no guardian angel will help you.

Get it and read it. Then get a copy of your own precinct list and start investigating this year's crop of candidates. If your interpretation of the Smyth Report and the world events behind it is correct, there is still a chance that the Star-Spangled Banner will continue to wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Just a chance - that's all. But get busy, neighbor. _ There's work to be done.