Giving Better Advice

The essay below is my way of working through the political issue of personal choice and how it affects the common good. The right to make an individual choice is highly valued in our culture. It got me to wondering if there’s a cost to honoring choice above all else. Thanks for taking the journey with me.

A friend and I are driving around the other day, when he turns to me and asks for my help in solving a problem of principle.

I assure him I can help. I feel wise and confident.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I was of no help.

Looking back on his problem and my answer, I realize my response was useless and shallow, too steeped in trying not to offend and keeping the neighborhood peace. The entire affair has consumed me ever since, in no small part because his issue with his friend involves the political debate of our time: Our obligation to the common good vs. our right to make choices.

From Arizona deserts to Maine forests to the shores of the Connecticut River where I live, we’ve been arguing for nearly a year about Covid-19 vaccines: Get a shot to protect your family and limit the viral spread in your community (which will also slow the virus’ ability to mutate) vs. “I call the shots.” Nobody can force me to put anything foreign in my body. It’s my choice.

My friend’s issue was not vaccines, rather schools. Break it down, though, and the arguments are eerily close. Sending your child to the neighborhood school is akin to getting vaccinated for the common good. We get vaccinated to protect us, also we get vaccinated to protect grandpa, but we also get vaccinated so the virus can’t use us seven billion humans as a massive laboratory experiment in which to develop another variant.

We send our children to the public school down the street because taking children out of public schools and enrolling them in charter schools (many of us don’t consider charter schools public, even though Massachusetts state law does) will have adverse financial and educational effects on the community. Bridge St. School, the public school in my neighborhood where my children attended, is without doubt a weaker school because so many of the neighborhood children attend private and charter schools. The classrooms in our school miss the vibrancy, experiences, and intellect of those children, the energy of their parents, not to mention the state money that follows the children when they choose charter school options.

Just like those who reject vaccines, parents who choose private or charter schools assert that every family should have the choice to send a child to any school that might deliver a better education. Don’t choose for me, they say, we know what’s best.

My friend is an ardent supporter of public schools, and one of his friends had announced that one of their children was going to a local charter school.

“I don’t know if I can be his friend anymore,” my friend in the front seat tells me.

“You mean you would just cut him off?” I ask.

“If he needed help, I’d be there for him,” says my friend. “But to hang out, get a beer, nah. I don’t know if I can do that.”

 I immediately seek compromise. My response, at its core, is: Be nice. Don’t roil the neighborhood waters. Ignore the decision of your friend to send his child to a charter school and find room for friendship, despite the disagreement. 

It’s my default answer. Be nice. After all, I am a retired elementary school teacher, so “Be nice” was part of how I ran my classroom. But it’s trite and ineffective here, because my friend is a passionate man for whom the decision about where he sends his children to school is an issue that helps define his identity. Having a good friend choose a charter school feels like an attack on the bulwark of what my friend believes.

So, be nice isn’t enough; it doesn’t begin to address the problem. But jettisoning your friends because you disagree about where to send kids to school cannot be productive either.

I spend the week thinking about choice in this country, how the idea is sacrosanct (unless you’re a woman in Texas, Mississippi, or…who wants to make her own reproductive choices), how the idea cannot be contravened, how if you argue against choice you’re exiled from the discussion. To be anti-choice is to be anti-American. 

I don’t mind being accused of being anti-American, but I want to be supporting something important while being labeled a traitor. What could be as compelling as my individual right to make my own choice?

Well, it’s us. 

It’s that old-fashioned idea that compels people to volunteer their time, to donate money to causes that help others — we have some good that we want to grow in common.

It’s your grandfather’s idea: the common good. If we put it another way, we call it the general welfare. That’s the language that the framers of the U.S. Constitution used in the Preamble to explain why we needed a constitution, “to promote the general welfare.” It seems the country grew up teetering on the fulcrum between freedom to choose and promoting the general welfare, except now “choice” is the bully kid keeping wimpy “general welfare” trapped in the air on their end of the seesaw.

Our neighbor chose to send his child to a charter school, in part I’m sure, because he thinks it will benefit his child, but also because the idea of a common good has lost its power. Choice is winning; “we” are losing.

In trying to figure out why the idea of choice dominates our decision-making and why we can’t mount an effective argument against it, I read a guest essay in the New York Times by two professors, Anita Sreedhar and Anand Gopal. The two are researchers trying to explain why people resist getting vaccinated.

Right away, they get my attention, when they write, “vaccine hesitancy reflects a transformation of our core beliefs about what we owe one another.”

I continue reading the essay and when I get to the words “vaccine” or “public health,” I insert the words “public education.” Sreedhar and Gopal write, “Public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves.”

The two professors cited one study that quoted a parent who refused to get her child vaccinated against measles. She rejected the argument that everyone had to do their part to eradicate measles by getting vaccinated. “I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child.”

My choice. My child. Forget it. That’s the choice argument that we get bullied by and know so well. Maybe it’s what my neighbor told my friend when explaining why he will send his child to a charter school.

If we are going to make the argument — and live by it — that some of what we decide must be for others — for the general welfare — then, I realize, my friend can’t unfriend his buddy who sent his child away to a charter school.

He also can’t ignore his friend’s choice and make nice like I had counseled.

We must argue for survival, for sticking together, for staying in solidarity. For the common good. 

Next time I see my friend, I have another answer: Have a beer with your buddy, knit the neighborhood closer, even though you’re annoyed with him. The reason is simple: He needs to trust you. It’s in that trust between two guys sharing a drink that maybe we can win back a tiny bit of the idea of being mutually obliged to one another.

And you don’t have to be nice about it.