As is my Sunday-morning habit, I am sitting here in my kitchen planning out the week and—as usual—I am listening to our local public radio station’s classical channel. Something about Sunday mornings just always says classical music to me.

While listening, I finally found myself motivated to go set up a monthly recurring donation. It is something I probably should have done a while ago, but kept not doing. No good reason not to… it was just one more thing on the list to go to, and that list is feeling pretty long these days.

I am happy to send them some money and I don’t begrudge them any of it, especially given that their federal funding is likely to be gutted by The Worst People.

Every time I make a donation like this in the current environment, though, I can’t help but think “Isn’t this what they want?” Like I said, I’m happy to donate money to my local public media joint, and I am not trying to discourage anyone else from doing so either. Quite the opposite—these folks need our support more than ever.

But to the extent that the assholes, clowns, and crooks that have managed to get their hands on the levers of power have a philosophy, I think a big part of it is “If you think this is important, you should be paying for it. Don’t take my money.”

I read a thing a while back about how some library somewhere had all of its funding cut, but the local community rallied around it and filled the gap. That’s great in the near term and I am not going to argue with people coming together to save their library. But this sort of thing is the institutional version of people having to post a GoFundMe to cover emergency healthcare expenses or to make their rent and not get evicted after a layoff.

The entire reason we come together as a society is that it is easier for us all to get by and live our lives if we pool our resources rather than all trying to do it on our own. But now we have this whole wing of the political spectrum that has convinced itself that taxes are theft and everyone-for- themselves is the way to go.

So I guess, yes—we should absolutely donate to local public media, support the library, and give whatever we can to help individuals dealing with crises. I just don’t want to find ourselves unwittingly buying into the broken and pernicious political ideology of right-wing aggressive individualism.

All of our civic infrastructure and institutions of social support and safety ought to be robust and well-funded, and the vast majority of that funding needs to be coming from all of us collectively. We can’t have all of this critical stuff be dependent upon individual contributors and at the whim of wealthy philanthropists.

Originally published at https://petebrown.gibber.blog/donating-to-npr-and-thinking-about-communal-needs.