OPEN LETTER TO PUBLIC SERVANTS

At the expense of the American people and with the blessings of unseen hands at high policy-making levels, you have created a subculture for yourselves we will call the bureaucratic class. There are millions of you now and, as of 2002, the bureaucratic class has near carte blanche authority to do anything it wants to the American people. It's as if you and your classmates are blessed with some magic shield that protects you from being held personally accountable for the damage you have inflicted upon the very people who have afforded your existence. You have been used by those unseen hands to morally, spiritually, economically and politically bankrupt the people of this nation.
The bureaucratic class in the United States has been growing steadily since “the New Deal.” From the humble beginnings of a few scattered overworked and underpaid public servants providing government services from impromptu field offices have sprung legions of high-paid bureaucrats with well-staffed offices centralized in government-owned complexes. The bureaucratic class has forgotten its service-based roots and has come to regard its protected-class status as a birthright.

Members of the bureaucratic class make comparatively high-end wages that come with comparatively elaborate benefits packages and the ability to charge many of life's expenses to the American people. Over and above all holidays off with pay, you accumulate sick time, vacation time and are allowed to take x number of personal days off each year -- with pay. No such largesse exists in the private sector as we must work almost half the year just to pay for you. While we have grudgingly afforded you these things with only moderate protest, you have been enforcing upon us increasingly invasive, injurious and absurdist policies.

If we complain and attempt to seek a redress of our grievances for your abusive conduct through agency superiors, congresspersons or the courts, we are denied. You are immune from prosecution while functioning in your official capacity -- even if you act abusively or beyond the scope of your authority. With increased wages, increased benefits, increased authority has come prosecutorial immunity so airtight you may wrongfully imprison and murder ordinary people without fear of repercussion. You have all of these things going for you and the law on your side so you must be doing the right thing, you rationalize. How else could you be allowed to steal the property, the children, the freedom and the life from people you must know in your heart do not deserve your bureaucratic wrath? The ends must justify the means, you assuredly tell yourselves while drowning your conscience in alcohol or medicating it with Prozac.

Look around you. As bureaucrats who enforce policies that tie ordinary people up into frustrated statutory knots, how many of them appreciate you? How many ordinary people are happy to see you compared to the ones who are barely able to contain the contempt your mere presence in their lives causes them to feel? How many lives have been improved through the functions of your office compared to the lives that have been destroyed by it? Would you say that over the last several years angry and destroyed people are beginning to drastically outnumber happy and improved people? Is that why many of you now address the public from behind bullet-proof glass and metal detectors?

There is an undercurrent of frustration in this country. Things are not going well for ordinary people because their lives are being taxed and regulated out of existence. Right now most people must content themselves to burden their friends and family members with their frustration because there is no other outlet for their emotions. But, what would happen if the magic shield that has protected you and your classmates is removed? Your protection is not divine. It is the construct of men. As easily as it has been given to you it can be taken away. Have you read the news lately? Enron, the lynx hair fraud, no scientific foundation for cutting off irrigation water to protect Klamath Basin suckerfish last year: Your protection is being removed.

The bureaucratic class has been set up to take the fall for a failed society. And, in apparent anticipation of imminent chaos, the Bush administration announced Feb. 3, 2002, that soon it will appoint a four-star general to command the American theater of operations for the Homeland Security Agency. Here is the scenario to which you must take heed: The hand that provided immunity to the bureaucratic class while it bankrupted the people of a nation is lifted. Media-triggered events expose the abusive actions of the bureaucratic class to the masses. The masses identify those in the bureaucratic class as the real cause of their misery and frustration and stop beating their children and spouses. Thousands of government offices are suddenly vacated as bureaucrats flee them in fear of their lives or are otherwise prevented from performing their duties. The structure of government begins to collapse. A power vacuum is created. Homeland Security steps in to administrate our socio/political unraveling as a nation. The general is commissioned to call out the armed forces and take military control of our domestic affairs. Think about it.

The description of the bureaucratic class and what it has done to the American people with murderous immunity cannot be disputed. The scenario above is not unprecedented in recent world history. It also cannot be disputed that, by enjoying the benefits of your class in trade for willingly and knowingly damaging innocent people, you have betrayed them. While worthy adversaries may respect one another, no one respects a traitor. ***

The purpose of this letter is to inform members of the bureaucratic class that it was created to perform a task that has been accomplished; you are now as expendable as us ordinary folks whose ranks you are about to rejoin. You have been used to destroy the people of this nation. Immunity for your lifestyle is evaporating. You have been positioned as an outlet for the prodigious anger and frustration that enforcement of increasingly injurious and absurd policies has generated in the people who have paid your wages. The only question remaining is, “what are you going to do about it?”

Don Harkins
The Idaho Observer