Last night, BJ and I set in bed with his lap top watching the premier episode of Parks and Recreation, the new sitcom on NBC. I was intrigued to watch the show because it is actually about the profession in which I am currently getting a degree, public administration. It's funny watching a show or movie about a topic you know a lot about. It makes the cleverness of all the comedy even more exaggerated.
The show is set in Indiana, so it spoofs the anti-government Mid-Westerner pretty well through the character of the mayor. Near the middle of the show, the mayor goes on a rant about how government is bad and we should do everything possible to make it smaller. Specifically, he talked about privatizing.
Now this was meant to be a funny little monologue, but I've been reading hundreds and hundreds (maybe even thousands) of pages over the past three months about the damage of privatizing and anti-bureaucrat rhetoric, and, additionally, I was tired from just completely a 39 page assignment in which a good 15 pages was devoted to the topic. So I decided to go on a rant of my own. It was a rant about the intrinsic value of government and the evils of unabashed privatization. I thought it was really thought-provoking and engaging. BJ did not. So I was banned from talking for the rest of the episode.
Four months ago, I never would have given this topic a second thought. I would have laughed at the joke, and moved on. But now I'm educated about it, and education has a way of making you care about things you didn't care about before. I take comfort, though, in knowing that if the show had been about a minister as opposed to a public administrators and if the topic of the trinity had been tossed around, BJ would have quickly stepped on his own platform. But what are the chances of that show ever premier? I'll probably never get the chance to ban BJ from talking *sigh*.
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