Right hand, left hand

Big in our news lately has been the story of the criminally insane man who escaped from his institution's group on a social outing at a big county fair in Washington. He was on a field trip with a large group of other mental patients, loosely supervised by a couple of staff members, when he simply walked away from them. He had packed all his clothes into his backpack, and had money with him - he was quite prepared. This man had been committed to a state mental institution, permanently and years ago, following his acquittal-by-reason-of-insanity of the murder of an elderly woman. The reason it is 'big news' is obvious: why is this man, who escaped custody once before (and was quite violent when apprehended that time,) out on a field trip to the fair in the first place? What part of 'insane murderer' faded into the background in his case file? And how?

It was 'family day' at the fair, by the way.

People are saying that - oops - the 'government' agencies involved really screwed up. (Are not actual people involved at some point?) I'd say that they did. But I'd also say it isn't at all surprising that they did. And it always comes back to the same issue.

(Pardon me, I'm back on the soapbox against Big Government 'saving' us all.)

The government is NOT going to solve our problems, keep us safe, or make good decisions on our behalf. It can't. It is an 'it.' It has, inherently, a fatal flaw in the 'problem-solving/decision-making/safe-keeping' department - a 'right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing' problem - one of multiple agencies, multiple missions, limited communication, no real possibility of continuity. In this case, the justice 'hand' did its job and committed this evil guy, and now the social service 'hand' is doing ITS job of making this poor guy have a happier life. It isn't really the SAME guy, I guess. Neither 'hand' ever considered that a common goal of keeping the criminally insane away from those he can hurt was expected by society.

I know it is very complicated - but that's in large part the point. We have individual rights. We have laws so numerous and convoluted and open to interpretation that no one has a clue. We have privacy issues and funding issues, policy issues and turf issues. Our issues have issues. We have competing interests, private interests, public interests, foreign interests. We have 'do a favor for my brother-in-law' interests and 'don't offend this group of contributors' interests. We have layer upon layer of decision-makers personally desperate to retain their positions and power and the accompanying graft. Petty bureaucrats work with ego-inflated politicians to influence policy that none of them have ever attempted to understand. We have more 'hands' bouncing balls around our society than the NBA... complications that 'doom' us, not 'excuse' us. We can't ever expect to work them out. Not to make 'good' stuff happen, anyway. They are mostly mutually exclusive.

Without a common vision of simple goals, clearly stated and constantly evaluated, things go wrong. Murderers go to the fair. Our government is too big to achieve anything but. We are expecting it to do 'all things' when it can't even do the few simple ones it was originally chartered to do.

It's time to pull it back, not expand the mess!