Who Will Be Our Next Nurses, Teachers, and Police Officers?
Our schools and houses of worship are battle-worn from years of bickering over COVID, book bans, and politics.
Our institutions are struggling to find nurses, police officers, teachers, and even pastors because their respective fields have become public battlegrounds.
Local gathering places like grocery stores, movie theaters, schools, parks, and churches have become, not places of communal gathering, but scenes of mass violence.
This social collapse is unnecessary and completely avoidable.
The deteriorating spirit of cooperation in public spaces is due in part to the dissolution of relationships.
Neighbors have become strangers.
Suspicion and fear of one another are ruling the day.
Social Institutions Serve the Common Good
One might think that the solution to our fear of one another is avoidance. At some point though, each of us as citizens requires this social infrastructure to function. These social institutions act as mediating common grounds that serve, not our individual needs, but our common or collective good.
Each of us needs schools to teach, hospitals to heal, police to protect and serve, government to order civic life, and places…
