It Isn’t Socialism, It’s Power Sharing

When Lori and I installed solar panels on our farmstead several years ago, we had a choice to make.  “For whom is this energy being generated?”  It was a pragmatic question, but also a philosophical one.  If our intent was to be “off the grid” and generate electricity for our household alone, we would need to add battery storage to the system to sustain us through the nights and even those cloudy or snow-covered days when generation is diminished or halted.  If we intended to remain connected to the world at large, then batteries were an unnecessary expense.  Functionally, we didn’t need to be self-sufficient.   Power lines are readily available in our area; our home, in fact, was already connected to them.  

 

The larger question, then, would lean us into the philosophical realm.  For whom, indeed, would this energy be generated?

 

That we ultimately opted to connect our solar panels to the energy grid strikes many as incomprehensible.  We remain as subject to power outages as anyone else on our gravel road.  A propane-fed backup generator gets us over those humps.  Because autonomy – complete self-reliance – was never our intent.  Instead, we rather like the symbiotic reciprocity of contributing, and receiving.  The larger body of electrical consumers benefits from our overproduction while we earn credit; when we under-generate, we use those credits and then purchase more.

 

Somehow, in recent years, that system of mutual benefit has gotten a bad name.

 

Of late, America has been characterized as an amalgam of totally independent monopods who simply wear the same jersey.  There is no “us,” just an accumulation of “me’s” who are singularly responsible for themselves.  We are “free”, to cite the current holy incantation.  “Don’t fence me in.”  “Don’t tread on me.”  

 

So it was that the Mayor of a Texas town, amidst the cold darkness of his town brought about by the power outage of a paralyzing winter storm, could shout to his constituents:

“The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!... If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! [sic]…. This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW will work and others will become dependent for handouts…. I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves!... Bottom line quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family! Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish [sic].”

 

“Take care of yourself.”  Anything else, we are told by the angry Mayor and just about anyone else in the prevailing thought of the day, is socialism.

 

But “socialism” is a shibboleth; a tired and sad trope used to divide the good from the bad, the lazy from the strong, the righteous from the parasitic.  Expecting one another to live and contribute their best, to take personal responsibility, and to be stewards of their gifts, resources and opportunities does not negate the concomitant truth that “we are in this together.”  I learned the latter not from some Marxist manifesto, but from my parents, my church community and its example, and the West Texas town in which I was raised.  I learned the former from those same teachers who found in the two principles no contradiction.

 

It isn’t an alien rapport.  We receive this paradoxical instruction from the craftsmanship of our own civilization – celebrating independence and privacy and the stimulating value of personal freedom, while simultaneously obviating those freedoms in the interest of the common good. We impose traffic regulations, erect stop signs and string signal lights to instruct who should “go” and who should “stop.”  We require seatbelts and liability insurance.  We abridge our otherwise wide-ranging freedom of speech, outlawing such mischief as crying “fire” in a crowded room where there is no blaze. We require, with only limited exceptions, vaccinations against virulent diseases.  These examples, along with thousands of similar abridgments – all for the common good.  Do we go too far at times?  Of course!  But we can just as harmfully become too libertine.  The political system exists, in part, to manage the tension between too little and too much.  Surely we are sophisticated enough to resist the silly – and dangerous – binary alternatives of all one or the other.

 

But if the disciplined witness of civilization isn’t teacher enough, we could revisit the scriptures we claim to hold in such high esteem.  Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures it was the failure not only to honor God in prayer and piety, but also the failure to honor God in the care of one another – especially the poorest and weakest - that routinely earned the people holy wrath.  In the Christian scriptures, the “one anothering” passages express the core of the gospel message – love one another, protect one another, feed and clothe and shelter and attend to one another.  Loving God is all mixed up with loving neighbor and self.  According to the letter to the Ephesians, we are to honor and hone and mature our particularly personal gifts not for the advancement and aggrandizement of self, but “for the upbuilding of the whole.”

 

The upbuilding of the whole.  Because we individuals are in this together.

 

It has been cold here in Iowa these recent weeks – bitterly, deeply sub-zero cold.  In the main chicken yard behind our house are two coops, between the two of them appropriately designed to house our 30 or so laying hens.  Chickens, as a rule, are fairly independent creatures, drifting off to remote parts of the yard to hunt and peck and, when back at the feeders and waterers, shoving each other aside to access fair share.  But on these bitter winter nights, all 30 of them pack themselves into a single coop that, as I mentioned, was sized for half that number.  It’s crowded and cramped and likely uncomfortable.  They seem to intuit, however, that the night will be difficult, and that if they are to survive, they need the warmth and shelter of each other.  It is, to return to the beginning, a kind of “power sharing agreement.”

 

Is that socialism?  

 

Once upon a time I would have responded, “No, that is common-sensically human.”  But perhaps I have unjustly attributed it.  The most we can say at this point is that it is common-sensically poultry.  They somehow comprehend that they are in this together.  

 

The rest of us apparently still have a few things to learn – or, perhaps more charitably, a few things to remember.