“There would have been outrage.” That was the first sentence of a guest column I wrote in 2010 for the then St. Petersburg Times. Unfortunately, between the newspaper’s transition to the Tampa Bay Times and a massive makeover in design and direction, the digital version of that opinion piece no longer exists, relegated to the “404, file not found” domain where old writing goes to die.
And, like so many writers, I don’t always hold onto or even value, stuff I wrote many years ago during my so-called youth, in this instance 16 years ago.
But that sentence–“there would have been outrage”—kept echoing in my head this morning, long beyond what I can even recall what provoked my call for outrage all those years ago.
The best I can remember, it had something to do with low or no expectations surrounding the education of our young people, possibly prompted by funding cuts, potentially motivated by a misguided belief in the “there’s nothing you can do when some people are just doomed to fail” mentality.
Maybe it’s the soaring price of home heating oil or the cost of filling our cars with liquid gold gasoline that got me thinking about a time when Americans would have pushed back against a philosophy rooted in ill-begotten gains by some and the creed that others are where they are because they don’t deserve more than they have.
It seemed to me it’s time to renew our commitment as a nation to outrage. America, after all, was, in part, founded on outrage. Those who separated from England were outraged by a system that taxed them unfairly and assumed they would quickly be subjugated to the will of the crown.
The king didn’t consider the outrage factor.
And we know how that ended.
It made me think that maybe 250 years later our current leaders also are blind to the coming outrage, if it’s coming at all.
And it should.
Outrage only happens because expectations aren’t realized: expectations of those elected to public service, not self-service. Expectations of one another as Americans, not red or blue, nor even red, white, and blue, but the expectation that WE are Americans and we ALL deserve more.
Expectations lead to accountability, both of ourselves and of others. Our government is no exception.
We get what we expect and we should expect more.
Absent expectations, outrage fills the void. Sometimes it must and it should—at least until fairness, equality and justice regain their proper place. That’s how change happens.
Expectations.
It’s a noun.
It should be a verb.