what is a government that doesn't give?

  it is a license to steal.

 if governments have been seized by people who stop giving , or thwart this essential activity, that doesn't mean they have stopped taking from citizens, or that they have begun dispersing power to all.

  a government that has stopped giving very often hasn't stopped giving at all.

 it has begun to give power only to the few, and if it's hard to see who the power is given to, chances are your government is giving to itself, or to the very rich.

  this is corruption.

 once this rot becomes visible, it usually means the entire foundation of a civic society has begun to sink.

  to collapse.

  it means it is time to start over, from the very foundation up.

  this is some of the hardest giving we, as citizens, may have to do.

 when we feel used up, abused, hard done and overlooked by the very governments that were supposed to serve us, we have one final act of giving to do—aside from building civic structures outside those governments so we can still function as a society. we need to give our hearts and minds to reenvisioning how our governments can work. we need to fight corruption by calling it out, by using the structures of society to prosecute it. to prosecute those receiving hands. otherwise we will wind up in a world in which giving actually goes one way, toward the powerful. and that is not a world any more than a dark star used to be a sun.


john freeman,
dictionary of the undoing