Crises? What Crises?

Public service is generally defined as serving in a job, often in government, where your work is to better the lives of the general public. That's generally how public service has been understood throughout American history.

Elected officials, politicians, are two things at once: public servants but also celebrities of a sort -- they need to have a certain charisma, "star power", magnetism of some sort that gets lots and lots of people to vote for them (at least get more votes than their opponents) and often has little to do with their qualifications or competence for the actual work of the job.

Something interesting has happened in last decade or two -- now we have politicians who clearly have no interest in serving the public, who don't care about doing the actual job. They just want to be a celebrity. 

Sarah Palin and then Trump are classic examples. But we have one big one closer to home.

Mayor Eric Adams is the very model of a modern politician -- he doesn't actually care about governing, he's not much interested in policy. He likes to hang out at nightclubs and rant about crime but doesn't seem have any vision, any policies, any ideas about helping the general public.

There are twin crises in NYC today that Mayor Adams seems wholly indifferent to:

1. The fact that, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, generations of Hasidic children are not receiving a proper education or being prepared for adult life, all of which is being partially subsidized by taxpayers. The New York Times published a bombshell investigation about how a huge number of Hasidic children are essentially living in a mini-North Korea. Adams response? It's no big deal. To be fair, this has been a years-long, bipartisan disgrace but this has been fully exposed on Adams watch -- and his response is to do nothing.

2. The odious thing about the conservative political movement is to say that government doesn't work and then, when they get control of the government, make sure it doesn't. There is currently a crises in the staffing of the municipal government because the salaries are too low, there are no work-from-home options, and attrition since COVID began has been awful. Again, Adams doesn't see a problem with this and, in fact, has contributed to the problem -- he wants the city government to lowball salaries to applicants for city jobs and has been totally inflexible on them working from home. 

Ross Barkan, a three-time Mr NYC interviewee, has a great new article about how Mayor Adams doesn't see this as a crises because he doesn't see governing as a priority. The depressing thing is that Adams is not an outlier, not the exception to the rule: he is the rule, he's the standard of today's politician who do nothing policy-wise, claim to have no responsibility for anything, and preen for cameras and social media feeds. 

So if you wonder why problems in today's city, today's country, today's society remain unresolved, this is why.