When observing the American political scene or listening to pundits on cable news it becomes clear that we are a nation of adult children who love to complain. We don’t want government intruding in our lives, taking our money, or telling us what to do. The term “socialist” is used without having any real understanding of what it in fact it means to live in a socialist country. In working with individuals, children and families who find themselves at-risk and in need of help what bothers us most is how people railing against government look to it for assistance when they find themselves in need. Our safety, ability to move, be taught, rise up, healed and comforted are all linked to some type of intervention from local, state and federal government agencies. Police officers, firefighters, nurses, doctors, teachers, mental health professionals, social workers, public transportation employees and public health officials are just some of the examples of our government in action for us.

The idea that we can depend solely on ourselves or on the private sector is one of the great myths out there. What works is a balanced pay as you go mentality between the public and private sectors, where we focus on common sense approaches to the challenges we face while investing in a vision of where our future wants and needs to go. Jacob Weisberg has an excellent piece in Slate that mirrors our own thinking titled “Down With the People: Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.” Here is an excerpt:

Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways clearly hasn’t been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we’re suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn’t want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There’s another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.