One of my many frustrating tensions in the current budget flap centers on the lack of transparency in the debates. On its face, the debate is about containing the run away train of a deficit that threatens our future prosperity. On some levels, I get this conversation. NPR told me yesterday that 40 cents on every dollar goes to interest in the debt. Unsustainable? Sure I guess so, especially if that number continues to grow. If I think of credit cards and paying 40% of my income on the interest from my Visa, I would be upset with myself too. I would tear up my card and seek to consolidate my debt with some sort of a bank loan to lower the interest rate if I could. Just about anybody could see my thinking.

On first glance the debate over the budget ought to be as clear as drinking water so that citizens can follow the ebbs and flows of the debate in order to make sense out of the positions taken by their representatives. In a perfect world we would be able to understand the machinations of our Representatives and Senators based on their votes for and against certain types of spending.
As we all know, it doesn’t work that way. Remember Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and twitch theory? Jack Burden (what a name) believed that his actions were like twitches. He would act and the twitch would end in an instant and life would move forward. One twitch had little to do with the next. Burden came to understand his naiveté.
Will we come to understand? The cutting of earmarks and defunding NWP is not a twitch at all. It is what Jack Burden would call web theory. Like a spider web, actions radiate from the center of the web outward. After awhile, as the web grows from its center, it comes increasingly difficult to tell its origin. New webs seem to appear and look similar to if not identical to the parent web. Soon colonies of webs create a world of rippling webs that are interconnected and make it difficult for us to remember where it all starts.
We cannot expect the current budget debate to crystallize for us. The NWP has been caught in a web. Senator John Kyl of Arizona has said that Republicans and Democrats are “throwing rotten apples” at each other. Maybe so. Unfortunately, the NWP is caught in the middle. As we move forward, the NWP needs to move cautiously but must not become paralyzed with fear. Careful attention is needed to both the financial and social issues contained in the debate just as we must focus on social and finanacial issues inside the NWP. The Republicans who were responsible for spending our peace dividend at the end of the Cold War and now claim that Americans want us to balance our collective checkbook are not being crystal clear with us. Democrats who abdicated responsibility by not passing a budget for this year when in was due last year because of a series events that made them look fearful of acting are equally opaque.
The truth is that we live in a world full of tangled webs. Money is just as much about social issues as it is about fiscal responsibility. Individual members of the NWP surely recognize the connection. However, if we allow ourselves to twitch on one issue, we will certainly feel the ripple somewhere else. We may not like that the budget is tied to social policy riders like Title X defunding of Planned Parenthood, but we cannot accept the notion that it has nothing to do with funding for NWP. The web is complicated. Somehow if Republicans want to pass their House budget, they are anti-women and Democrats who don’t want it to pass are against paying for the military. Huh? These debates remind me of what I know about icebergs. We only get a small glimpse of the overall size of an iceberg from what we see above the surface. The truth is that below the surface resides the biggest part of the iceberg. When it comes to political parties, it means that there is always more than meets the eye.

The nearing government shutdown is beyond my limited insight. Maybe yours too. However, we cannot absolve ourselves from responsibility. If we concede and become bystanders in the controversy, we forfeit large parts of our agency. We become victims. We allow others to act on us, and accept the indignities that result. However, when we act, we have to be astute. We cannot write off Republicans or Democrats. We must find ways to work on both sides of the aisle. Individually, we need to recognize that ignorance comes at a price. Life is politics. If we choose to remain apolitical we are in fact casting a political vote. We need to stop kidding ourselves. The struggle we must embrace is existential. It is one that defies a final victory. If we are successful, we live to struggle another day. It is in this struggle that we find peace with ourselves. The NWP should form an action team immediately. Despite the shortage of dollars or rather because of it, the NWP needs to figure ways to construct bi-partisan messages that carry the same sort of cache as the no tax lobby, the defense industry, and the gun lobby. We may never be in a better position than we are today to insure our future. It is incumbent on us to recognize that promoting promising educational practice is inherently political and as sophisticated as any spider web. Select sites determined by an application process from around the country should meet and plan strategy. The NWP ought employ the use of outside consultants to help us frame a message. Think George Lakoff here. We need to develop the sort of infrastructure he documents in his work so that we can guarantee a future for our teachers and our kids.

More prescient than ever is the notion that we live in a tangled world. As much as we would like to separate one issue from another and live in a world of isolated twitches and jerks, we need to resist that urge. Life is messy. Embrace it. If we survive one day, get a good night’s rest because tomorrow we navigate a tangled web again.

Peter Shaheen Oakland Writing Project