This is gearing up to be the worst year in the history of public service for the United States.

Under the guise of eliminating waste, entire agencies devoted to protecting Americans now and in the future have been cut. Services that work to make Americans safer and healthier, and protect them from being further left behind, have been gutted. Part of the great con is that it is the free market that keeps us together. In fact, it is public service, whether via judges, park rangers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, or scientists, these people work for a cause greater than the buying, selling, and accumulation of stuff.

Is there waste in public service? Yes.

Are there public servants who are wolves or bricks of lard? Yes.

But I want to remind you of something.

There’s no perfection in any field, any company, or any business, and even in government. Whether Apple, Google, Disney, or the Department of Defense, all have experienced failures.

It’s why a more perfect union is the key to remember in anything you do. To work to be better.

Our system, without the supports and restraints that public services provide, would not only be left to the whims of an already immoral free market, but we would also have laid aside any notion of preserving and protecting opportunities for future Americans.

Let’s take the example of the United States Postal Service, the oldest continually operating public service we have, and the one that is commonly targeted as inefficient.

The postal service delivers roughly 370 million pieces of mail every day, yet it isn’t just a delivery network. It is a connective glue that binds the country together, a daily act of democracy that reaches every household, regardless of wealth or geography. Casey Cep’s essay on her mother’s decades as a rural mail carrier, and Stephen Grant’s memoir of his own time in the USPS, reveal a truth that is both simple and profound: we need services dedicated to the nation, not just to making a profit.

When we reduce these services to budget line items or the whims of the well-to-do, we reduce community fabric to a series of transactions. Services like the post office are a bulwark against current efforts to divide people by race, money, and religion; a reminder of the true, initial effort of the Constitution that everyone, everywhere, matters equally

Postal workers are also our neighbors. They are first responders to the many shut-ins and elderly that barely see anyone on any given day. In addition, the post office provides good, local jobs, many of them unionized, and opportunities for veterans and those without advanced degrees.

Libraries, public transit, fire departments, schools, hospitals, emergency services, garbage collection, senior centers, museums, and parks; these are more than just books, buses, and playing bingo. They make up the genuine community. Without such services, we would depend on paying what the private market dictates or go without. We’d have worse traffic, more pollution, more isolation, less beautiful land, and fewer well-paying jobs.

This year, jobs and services in the public sector were cut not for any clear economic reason, but simply because they could, a level of arbitrariness typically part of the risk associated with private sector employment.

We already know that private markets do not work for everyone. When services like public health immunizations, housing assistance, after-school programs, and food stamps are cut, the burden shifts to…the private market?

You already know the answer.

It will be up to overstretched charities, family savings, emergency rooms, and heroic individuals to fill the void. The result is greater instability, worse health outcomes, and higher long-term costs for society as a whole.

The pandemic should have made the necessity of public services painfully clear. Instead, we’ve rewarded them with scorn and unemployment.

The United States did not become a nation by the values of Wall Street, hedge funds, and con artists. It became a nation by investing in the common good of roads, schools, power generation, hospitals, libraries, and post offices; by ensuring that no one was too remote, too poor, or too different to matter.

To cut these services is to cut the lifeblood of the country we have built. There’s a universality and equity in these public goods. Everything is not for profit or to be sold. The market cannot guarantee a library in every town, a bus in every neighborhood, or a mail carrier on every rural road. It cannot ensure that the vulnerable are protected, or that the nation’s promise reaches every citizen.

The so-called “waste” is, in fact, the cost of inclusion—the difference between a nation and a marketplace. When we cut these services, we may save money, but we lose something far more precious: the sense that we are all united in this together.

You can see it diminishing every day.

As the private market has expanded into public services, as stock markets are as high as they’ve ever been, as we have more billionaires and private yachts, the average working family has lost ground.

That’s a public policy problem, not a public service one.

In the end, the question is not whether public services can be run like businesses, but whether a nation can survive if it is run only for business.

To keep the nation we have, we’re going to have to get back to investing in each other, not for potential profit, but for the common good.

This issue is much more timely than you may think. Right now, we are suffering from a profound loss of community cohesion. The void of social media has replaced the “public commons”—places where people would normally gather. While we have numerous friends in the digital world, we rarely meet real ones in real public spaces.

There are two primary reasons for this.

First, despite the connection between a healthy community and the built environment, public places have been devalued, as illustrated by the examples in this piece. Second, the combination of unchecked public health issues and lax gun control has made public gathering riskier. Most parents, influenced by the constant barrage of crime reports, know that it takes only one tragic incident to change lives. The natural response is to avoid going out and to keep children indoors. A higher perception of safety outranks the loss of social maturity.

The author notes how making things uncomfortable for the homeless has, in fact, made public life uncomfortable for everyone. As an urban planner, I’ve noticed this trend for decades: benches removed, mothers with children forced to stand in the sun waiting for a bus, broken sidewalks without shade, and transit stations lacking any sense of form, comfort, or artistic design.

Because we’ve allowed public investment to devolve into political warfare, our public spaces have become an afterthought. I recently spent a lot of time in London’s Victoria Station, which is now super inviting, with tens of thousands of residents and visitors passing through every day. There were also people down on their luck, but they seemed to follow unspoken rules of public decorum. Any issue was quickly addressed by a coordinated network of business staff and police. People were not allowed to panhandle or be disorderly. The place was kept clean. There was a sense of pride. Even the downtrodden could sit at a table or a bench like anyone else, but being considerate of others was expected.

If we want more decency in public, we have to get sane on gun control, and stop treating public space as wasted space. We are in desperate need of making it easier, safer, and enjoyable to be in shared public spaces.

I’ve noticed certain things as I’ve gotten older. It’s harder to read small type. Even with glasses. Flexibility starts to diminish. I find myself recognizing the importance of yoga and moving and keeping muscles stretched and active. I can’t eat what I used to, nor should I. Sometimes I sleep well. Other times, not so much. My skin seems to be thinner, like a layer has peeled away. If I horse around with my sons, I feel like they could accidentally break me.

The doctor in this article mentions a couple of items I’m not aware of, and the advice is solid from what I’ve experienced. The most important element here is getting outdoors. Staying busy doing things. I went to a conference decades ago where I learned doctors from Emory Univerity in Atlanta prescribed working in the hospital garden as part of recovery.

Doctors need to prescribe a walk in the park or neighborhood maybe just as much as medications. When I worked in conservation, I tried to get the agency to focus on the mental health aspects of the outdoors, and to embrace something like Screen Free Week and use it to promote all of the outdoor programs the agency has to offer.

We need the sun, and we need to be moving. It does not take a higher degree to see a connection between the more time we’re spending indoors and the social ills that are plaguing us. In a way, we’ve gone back to a caveman style of living, staying inside more when our connection to the Earth is part of our health.

We are from the Earth.

This week saw yet more shootings of kids in school, and one tragedy for all the public to witness.

I recall the two times I ran as a candidate for office and the few individuals I ran across that had a “screw loose”. There were the door slams, the middle fingers, verbal abuse, and burned and run over yard signs. If you don’t get any negative responses, you probably haven’t worked hard enough.

Fortunately, we have free speech laws. Unfortunately, our country runs on emotion, and our politics continues to follow suit, doing more entertaining and pandering than honest leading and truth seeking. We don’t take governing ourselves in freedom seriously enough. We’ve had a saturation of guns, killing over personal grievances, and hate speech for so long, we’re no longer surprised; we expect things to happen.

This can never be normalized.

During my recent trip into the hedgerows of Normandy, France, we had a bit of a peculiar incident. We were looking over an area of farmland segmented off by lines of trees. Our guide was pointing out that after D-Day, allies advanced inward across farm fields, some which were purposely flooded by the Germans to slow their approach. The goal was to reach and secure the small bridge we were looking over. While we there in this beautiful area, suddenly, three re-enactors appeared alongside one field. Two were dressed as allied forces. One was dressed as an SS officer, walking and smoking nonchalantly as if just another day.

Our guide mentioned to us that there are occasional reenactments in the area, but it was illegal for the one young man to be dressed as a Nazi. I asked him why, and he mentioned it is considered a form of hate speech in France.

Such laws do not stop the French from using their voices and protesting. In fact, if you see any of the news this week, Paris is experiencing strikes. Their strict guns laws and limits on certain types of speech does not stop the French from taking to the streets and expressing anger and frustration.

They just do it in a more proper way, and Americans died to recover their right to do so.

America’s gift to the world was a country run on the consensus of voices. If you don’t like what you hear, it is up to you to teach yourself, to learn, and then to articulate a better message. You gain power through persuasion and reason, not force and aggression.

I want a country where my kids, if they ever decide to run for public office, can safely go to your door and ask for your vote, and where people can agree to disagree and cherish the right to do so.

There is no liberty where people can’t be safe to speak.

And Now….

Don’t forget the tens of thousands of public servants who have lost their jobs. Keep them in your hearts and minds as we go into the holiday season, a time when we are typically to consider grace and gratefulness for our blessings, our loved ones, and those we don’t know.

It’s all part of being a better angel, a better human being.

Never give up trying.