The hundreds of letters I get every week have always been a varied lot. But for the last two or three years there has been an ever larger proportion of complaints about our complex society and the government that controls much of it. "Nothing works any more;" "government can't be reached or doesn't respond" -- these are the themes I hear much more often these days, and I've been doing a lot of thinking about "the system" -- what it means, where it fails, and what it ought to be.

It seems to me that much of what we hear about the worsening "quality of life" can be traced to the faulty workings of a society in which, whether by choice or not, we are all involved from birth to death. The simpler days are gone, and the hard fact is that every step we take -- paying a bill by mail, or buying a house, or getting to work in the morning -- is shaped by a huge, impersonal network of institutions and machines. It is this network -- "the system" -- which increasingly controls our lives and determines whether they are rewarding or unpleasant.

In this year's questionnaire, I listed thirteen broad problem areas and then asked you to do two things: check each category in which you felt you had a current problem (the results are listed below), and then pick out the one problem bothering you most and give me a detailed description of it.

Many people objected to the pessimistic format of a questionnaire that defined things in terms of what's wrong. One clergyman suggested that I try to change the "current jargon from 'problems' to 'opportunities.'" There is something in what he says. For if 6,000 adults answered my invitation to write about what's wrong, then maybe 287,000 adult Arizonans were not interested or troubled enough to bother. Their lives may be perfectly happy and rewarding. But the group that did reply suggests that there are thousands of Arizonans who are unhappy and frustrated people.

In the remaining space I propose to let my respondents tell their own stories in excerpts from typical replies. But let me first register the major reactions I had after I had read through the responses:
  

Some soft-drink manufacturer a few years ago dreamed up the term "throw-away bottle," and to an increasing degree we seem to live in a "throw-away society." We started out discarding gadgets, bottles, garbage and eight-year-old cars. Now we seem to have gone on to "throw-away" traditions, customs, and -- if my questionnaire is any guide -- we are threatening to develop a whole class of "throw-away people." I'm not talking about minorities, or the handicapped. For my survey indicates that the 20,000,000 people over 65 are the most overlooked, misunderstood, and unhappy segment of our population.
 

Sometimes illness had already struck and the writer was totally destitute.

Income, food, medical care, transportation, and housing are the great problems of old age -- the same difficulties that younger and middle-aged people face, but for an older person who cannot work, these troubles are insurmountable. Often a grown son or daughter who is striving to contribute to a parent's care is affected too.

Inflation and the cost of living came out in the survey as the problem most often cited. "Spending money as if it were going out of style" used to be a joke, but it seems that the dollar is going out of style, penny by penny. People feel they are getting less and less for their money, and poorer quality for rising cost. Last fall's wage-price freeze, necessary as it was, was so mishandled that it helped big business and took advantage of the "little guy" who feels he still hasn't recovered.

Through these letters ran a common theme: it's not so much that everything costs more, and that the government takes more, but that "what you get" is no longer satisfactory.

Have we been "led around by the nose?" This country has always offered its citizens "the good life" in terms of material goods -- we have the newest, the shiniest, the most, and until recently, the most comfortable and the best. But these days the consumer often finds his money won't buy good housing, safe, low-maintenance cars, reliable appliances, or even assurance that his family gets nutritious food.

Maybe we need to think about what "necessities" really are. If they are what we need to live, then these are the things we would die without: air, water, food, space, shelter, clothing, medicine -- in that order. It is frightening to think that three of these things were once taken for granted in this country and are now beginning to cost money, as clean air, pure water, and adequate space come to depend on whether one can afford to live in an unpolluted and decently-designed area.

Housing in the Tucson area is an example of a necessity that has become nearly unobtainable. Shoddy construction, inferior building materials, contractors' delays, and broken promises were often cited by home buyers who felt they have very little chance of redress.

Renters also feel helpless. And too often new housing is built more with the profits than the needs of the community in mind.

And car insurance was, next to medical insurance, the greatest financial burden for my respondents. Past record is considered in determining the premiums, making it impossible for some to have insurance at all. Many suggested "no-fault insurance" to alleviate this situation.
 

From a doctor:
 

And from patients and their relatives:
 

From reading the questionnaires, where medical care showed up as number two problem for my constituents, one might gather that every family that has had a major illness in the last few years was all but wiped out. And private insurance policies can be cancelled after a serious illness.

Medicare, cited as a blessing by those eligible for it, nevertheless does not cover eye or dental problems serious as these can be for the aged -- and can disallow treatment already received as "unnecessary" when the patient has had to take the doctor's word for its necessity.

I agree with a man who wrote to me:
 

People looked back with nostalgia at the time when they could leave doors unlocked, walk through any part of the city at any time of night without fear. The risk and fear of street crime -- and the rumor of street crime -- militate against the good life for us all. Organized crime is disheartening in a different way, making us feel that things are rotten at a higher level. Recent publicity about prisons has given us the feeling that our treatment of criminals makes no sense and that our "correctional" institutions really don't correct but instead produce more criminals.

In our changing culture, many things made illegal in the past strike people today as merely immoral or eccentric.

The difficulty seems to lie in defining "victimless" crimes. At present we are all victims of contempt for law, physical risk and a sense of unease that erode the good life as surely as a constant infection erodes good health.

Another aspect of this feeling that nothing makes sense is of course bureaucracy. Red tape, rudeness, and indifference on the part of public servants, impersonality, the proliferation of agencies and the phrase "unresponsive government" were mentioned in hundreds of letters.
 

Predictably the IRS forms were bitterly critized.

One man went so far as to send the IRS a blank check with the note, "You figure it out!" It was, of course, returned.

Experiences like these, which we have all had, contribute to the meaninglessness of life, not because of their seriousness but because of their frequency. Under the heading "Bureaucracy" everything from nepotism to junketing Congressmen came in for its knocks. But somehow all the complaints were related. All of them indicated despair over a government machine -- federal, state, county, and local -- that doesn't care.

Most people object to paying taxes to support "those who won't work." On the other hand, people in authentically desperate straits wrote that because of technicalities they did not qualify for any or enough public assistance. Everyone seems to recognize that there must be some assistance for those who can't work. At least the first 16 years of a person's life and probably the last ten or twenty years, with life expectancy increasing as it is, are not working years. If people are not supported by their families during those 26-36 years, or if they have not been able to provide for their own old age, no one wants to see them go hungry, particularly the children.

And yet welfare abuse is understandably a very sore point. There are some chiselers on the welfare rolls, and when a big boondoggle comes to light it is disheartening to those who work and pay high taxes. Welfare needs restructuring, not only to eliminate the possibility of cheating but to change the "system" that keeps people on welfare for two or three generations. The present system does not restore families to the work-force as it encourages able-bodied men to desert their families.

So many wrote to me in bitterness and shock having found that their benefit was not enough to live on, that I would have to agree that a re-education program is in order. Social Security is an earned right. It was never meant to replace completely the income a person loses at retirement, but with the way things are now it is frequently not even an adequate supplement, and I believe the Congress must do something to bring the benefit rates up to adequate levels.

Property taxes are another way in which the old suffer. Two or three wrote that they had had to sell their houses, which they owned outright, because their pensions did not increase with taxes levied to support public schools. Their own children had left school long ago, and they didn't see why they had to bear the burden of educating other people's children.

It is agreed that there must be public education, but there is a great deal of controversy about what should be taught and how.

Low pay, too many non-teaching duties, over-crowded classes, low morale, and lack of funds and facilities can combine to make it almost impossible for teachers to do a good job.

I received a thoughtful analysis of the class response to my questionnaire from an American Problems class in a Tucson high school. These students mentioned, in their comments on drug abuse, that drugs were readily obtainable even in school. This suggests that there's a lot more to the "problem of education" now than there used to be, and many hinted at a real over-haul of the philosophy of education.

The Viet Nam war has certainly produced a great deal of waste, material and spiritual, and has, I think, been a great factor in making us reconsider what we are and what we want as a nation. There were a few letters protesting the end of the war without a military victory, but many wrote about the disillusionment with their country because of our continuing involvement.

It is to be hoped that the most frequent complaints about the military and the draft as they are now will be solved, eventually, by the Modern Volunteer Army being created now.

Military personnel problems have their parallel in the civilian sector with industry lay-offs and business shutdowns. Unemployment is a problem for veterans, disabled laborers who know no other work, and highly trained professionals who are unable to find work in their field of expertise.
 

The problem of the over-40 overqualified professional out of a job is nationwide at the moment. Retraining is the only answer I can see. We cannot let a person who has trained hard to serve a national need of any kind become a drop-out from the work force and suffer the financial hardship and emotional misery of unemployment in a society that has always had a "work ethic."

From a farmer:
 

And from a small businessman:
 

If ever there are no small local businesses and farms, American life will have become even more depersonalized, and probably its "quality" will worsen still more.

From a student:
 

And this:
 

And yet there were letters like the following:
 

Asthmatics and others with respiratory ailments who came to Tucson for their health now have as many bad days as good days.
 

America's traditional attribute has been optimism. If we can isolate and define our problems we can solve them. I put down these stacks of pessimistic and unhappy mail with the feeling that we ought to try to get back together again, that we can search for and find ways to give people hope; to make civil servants more civil and more inclined to give service; to enlist the idealism and enthusiasm of young people; to regain our sense of community and optimism.

I came away from this interesting experiment with a determination that in 1972 -- and after -- this one congressman is going to be working on an action program which will include these things: