We need government to collect taxes, keep the roads in repair, maintain order in the streets, justice in the courts, etc., but we certainly don’t need this. They don’t pay us, we pay them, yet they’re the one who call the shots while the rest of us stand by with our knees knocking.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Buechner wrote this book in 1988. I read this quote on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, when our government-country-world was in the throes of financial chaos. All because of the capriciousness of one man.

Here’s more of what Buechner said,

On both sides of the Iron Curtain, in Islam as well as in Christendom and the Third World, they have their conflicting political systems, ideologies, and holy causes to be sure, but by and large they give the strong impression of wanting little more than a chance to raise their children as best they can, keep the wolf from the door, have some fun when they’re through working at the end of the day, find some sort of security against old, and all such as that.

Their leaders, on the other hand, are continually delivering ultimatums to each other, plotting to confound each other any way they can manage it, spying on each other, vilifying each other, impugning each other’s motives, spending billions on weapons to destroy each other, and all such as that.

If at this most basic level, governments don’t reflect the dreams of the people they govern or serve their wills, you wonder what on earth governments are. … They seem to have a life and purpose of their own quite apart from the lives and purposes of anybody else. They are perpetually locked in desperate struggles with each other that have little if anything to do with the general human struggle to live and let live with as little fuss as possible. It’s we ourselves who have given them the power to pull the whol world down on all our heads, and yet we seem virtually powerless to stop them.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark