http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/world/london-highrise-fire-1.4159649Horrifying news of a deadly fire in a large 20+ highrise in London. I find this event to be a signifier and a new kind of reminder about how our culture is falling back.
If you go back to the 1940s and earlier, you can find reports of awful fires and disasters happening regularly. These disasters were largely stopped due to our culture of having a strong public morality, and looking to government to implement and enforce safety rules. Reading threads about this fire, it's clear that "the" public has no idea why and how fires have been prevented, and that is a microcosm about how government works to protect the many.
Humans, generally, are slow to adapt to low level pervasive threats. Flooding, car safety, and climate change are examples of threats that require very wide collective action and that have taken years or decades for a response. As government loses our trust over the long term, as they lose touch with the sleeping masses that they represent, as they move to satisfy our urges for divisive identity politics... as all of this happens they are neglecting their primary duty to work for us.
Objectively, let me not cast aspersions on others and look at my own country. In Canada, I can't help think of the issues with healthcare, with us having the worst ER times in the western world and yet healthcare debates necessarily take on the cloak of identity politics. It's a shame.
We either have to decouple the necessary protective role of government from democracy, or create publics that actually understand and watch government closely or we will devolve.
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