What have the Romans ever done for us?

One of Monty Python’s greatest scenes features a meeting in Roman Jerusalem. John Cleese introduces the motion, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” It all starts to go downhill when someone says, “Well, there’s the aqueduct.”

A couple years into my time as principal at Miami High School, a lovely couple dropped by to visit. Really nice people who graduated from Miami sometime in the late 1960s, had been up at one of the state parks for a Tea Party rally, and thought they’d drop by on their way back to the Valley. After a tour of campus and their stories about how being Vandals had set them up for successful careers and family life, they started talking about their day.

You may recall the Tea Party about a decade ago, people who wanted to reduce taxes and government regulation, tighten the borders, things that are pretty sensible unless they go too far. As the lady was telling me the story of their day, I started to see a disconnect between what she was describing and how she was describing it. Everything was negative, unfair, wrong, needed to be completely overthrown. But these were nice, successful people who had taken time out of their day to stop at their old high school and tell us how much they appreciated the education they had received.

Eventually the husband caught my eye and said, “You’re not convinced, are you? What’s your take?”

You know, in a school all sorts of things go on every day that people don’t even see. I call them “of course” things. The building is open, well lit, clean, maintained, of course, but that takes a lot of work. The classrooms are all led by teachers, highly qualified teachers in Miami’s case, of course, but hiring and developing and supporting highly qualified teachers in a small, rural town is a serious enterprise. The kids show up and are mostly well behaved and actually attend class, of course, but that takes a lot of effort and guidance and training as well. And years of being responsible for all that in a school has taught me that there’s a similar amount of unseen work most places, like the part of the iceberg we don’t actually see.

So here’s what I heard our lovely alumna say. They woke up that morning, took their daily medications [safe because of FDA oversight] that were provided by Medicare [government program] and checked the forecast on the National Weather Service [government agency] on the internet [created by a Defense Department research project]. They got in their car [which conformed to government safety regulations], drove at no cost on state and federal highways to a state park that didn’t charge an entrance fee to senior citizens. After leaving their rally about how government doesn’t do anything for us, they stopped at the high school that prepared them for college and career for a nice chat. Then they planned to drive those highways back to the Valley and pick up their grandparents at their free public school.

None of that made her critiques of government spending and regulation and immigration policy wrong. Reasonable people can differ on those things. But it did provide context. And that context was that we all benefit from government every day, even when we think the price is too high.

I suspect everyone has been on the receiving end of this lesson. Just the other day I saw someone verbally abusing the clerk at the grocery store. Not for any good reason, at least not anything the clerk had done wrong, but there it was and they had two little kids with them who were watching closely and now probably think that’s how we should treat each other.

Certainly, principals come in for this. From grandparents who don’t understand why we can’t accept food deliveries for their grandkids and their friends – the answer is allergies and the fact that they didn’t bring the food during the right lunch period, and that we once caught someone bringing drugs in between the pizza and the box. From parents who want their kid to walk at graduation even though they’re still several credits away from a diploma. From the guy who got mad when I flew the flag at half-staff for a teacher who was drowned in a flood.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d bet good money that we could have handled each of those situations better, but we still ought to remember that the important thing is that the store is there and full of food, that the school is there educating our kids. I saw a great line recently: We’re all just walking each other home.

And that’s why context matters. No matter how those lovely alums felt about their taxes, they had an awfully nice day and awfully nice lives, at least in part because there’s a whole system around us to guarantee the “of course” things like opportunity and safety and a chance to live a good life.

And that’s where John Cleese finally gets in the scene from Life of Brian: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”