Paris and Baltimore have the same ambition for the coming year — to make local waters swimmable.
Paris has been cleaning up the Seine for the 2024 Summer Olympics, while all good souls devoted to a cleaner Baltimore Harbor want to have a public swim next spring, weather and effluents permitting.
We should praise both ambitions because they are great causes. Without idealists who work toward the common good — and clean water is a way-high common good — then we are doomed to some dark dystopian hell instead of a healthy, civilized life within a liberal democracy.
It’s important to point out that the desires for a swimmable urban river in Paris and a swimmable harbor in Baltimore turn on the quality of sewer systems in these cities.
No doubt, Baltimore’s system still has problems, while the legendary system under Paris has lingering issues as well. These words from a news report about the cleanup of the Seine sound familiar: “Heavy rains overwhelm the city’s outdated sewage system …” That is historically what causes the waters around Baltimore to become polluted — a sewer system of pipes easily overwhelmed in big storms.
Baltimore Harbor is not a bather’s paradise, and no one has been permitted to swim in the Seine for 100 years. The Queen City of the Patapsco still has a lot of work to do — and more millions to spend — to fix our pipes and treatment plants, while the Queen City of the Seine invests $1.5 billion to clean up the river before the Olympics.
But, it’s also a fact that, way back when, both cities built sewer systems for the common good — to reduce filth, odors and mainly disease.
Perhaps I’m just pointing out the obvious. But I take nothing for granted in these strange times. It’s no longer a given that sufficient numbers of Americans understand the concept of the common good, so I’m using sewer systems as an example.
In Paris, the sewer tunnels not only improved public health and the general quality of life; they were part of a massive undertaking that wrought changes to the way the city looked, with wide boulevards and sidewalks, parks and grand public spaces. (Today there’s a museum devoted to the history of the Paris sewers; I got to visit it in September.) The construction of the sewer system improved water quality in the Seine. Fifty years ago, only a few species of fish swam in the river; today more than 30 do. In the Baltimore Harbor, anglers have caught plenty of rockfish during their urban migrations. Twenty years ago, few of us would have thought that possible.
Other obvious examples of the government and private sector serving the common good: roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, marine terminals, courthouses and prisons.
Some people believe it should stop there, that the government has no business doing much else, that private capital and commerce should be the drivers of society, and never mind about national health insurance or even Social Security, Head Start and public education.
Though they benefit from it mightily, many Americans have no sense of what devotion to the common good wrought in the nation’s history. To many, the common good sounds like “socialism,” something that must be vanquished. You hear that with more frequency in the cynical and incoherent rhetoric of Donald Trump, the chief MAGA Republican. He refers to government as a sinister “deep state,” and never a force for good.
These anti-government attitudes, the mindless ridicule and dismissal of science and the hyper-partisanship that creates gridlock in Congress all work against progress. We have wasted a lot of time arguing over nonsense — and giving tax breaks to the wealthy — instead of tending to basic things that should have been fixed by now. Even in a growth economy, ours remains a polarized, violent nation with declining life expectancy.
I don’t know when or how Americans come to understand the benefits of the common good. But it should be taught in schools because it lives right alongside the concept of democracy.
In the ideal, citizens in a democracy take part in the democracy by voting. You feel heard when you vote, feel part of something. When the people we elect to office take action, we feel we’ve had some say in the matter.
If, as appears to be the desire of some Americans, we lived in an autocratic state, with a powerful leader, the common good would be myth, no matter how beneficent the leader. In an autocracy or dictatorship, things are done mainly to help the leader or the state, not the people.
Robert Reich, writing on this same subject recently, defined the common good: “A set of shared commitments to the rule of law, to democracy, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights and equal opportunity, to participating in our civic life, to sacrificing for the ideals we hold in common, to upholding the truth.”
Maybe I’m wrong; maybe even an extreme MAGA Republican understands, in quiet moments away from all the noise, that we’re all in this together.
I still want to believe that a majority of Americans understand that.
Acts of government for public benefit are more likely to happen, and bear much greater meaning, in a democracy where the common good is paramount, where people rise up and demand accountability, progress and clean, swimmable water.
