Seen recently, scrawled on a toilet paper dispenser in a Texas bathroom:

First, in black sharpie:

STOP BIG GOVERNMENT

Immediately beneath, in another's writing:

help each other then

I normally pass over toilet graffiti unmoved, but this one hit me so square on the nose I had to write it down. This seven word argument that smashingly undercuts a traditional conservative battle cry pretty perfectly sums up much of what I feel.

I'd love it if government institutions could be lean and un-invasive, and let us go about our lives unencumbered. But as the respondent on that toilet paper wheel so succinctly points out, we are not doing a good enough job of helping each other through difficulties and trials, sickness and disasters.

Some churches do good things, but as often as not, it seems, help comes with a hook. Those helped have to endure a proselytizing in the process. Free food on the condition of open ears is not charity, it's a sales pitch.

Individuals conversely seem to be accidentally or consciously swallowing Ayn Rand whole, looking out for number 1 and to hell everybody else. I can't tell you how many "stop big government" truckers I meet who, in the same breath, decry government intervention and panhandlers on the side of the road. The government's not supposed to step in, and damned if they'll spare a dime. Who's supposed to help keep these people from starving to death? I assume that the disease and death of these unfortunates while no help is offered them is not acceptable to you. If it is, I really don't care to discuss the social contract with you until you can pull your head out of your ass.

How can we have a society that protects its citizens from byzantine privation without either a government or a populace willing to make the investment?

A bleak scene from the Katrina aftermath is emblazoned on my mind. A string of people very vocally protested the fate of a poor elderly woman whose corpse was sitting in a wheelchair outside the superdome. The corpse was covered in a dirty bedsheet. "Look at the indignity of this" was the refrain. "How can people be treated this way?"

How indeed, when so many of those voices belonged to able bodied young people just as capable as the government of stepping in and taking a old woman's corpse somewhere decent to be laid to wait for its final rest. In that moment, I first understood the impossibility.

The government can't do it right, and the people won't.

This world is not a nice place to live.