It was a damp, hot Saturday in Mobile in 1962, and I was a young Public Health Service employee who probably wasn’t much use to anyone. But it was an important day, and I remember three things about it.

It was a very long day. From the time we opened the doors that morning, people walked through gymnasium, getting their sugar cubes. They weren’t noisy; they just shuffled along in their place in line. Since I was standing in one place, it was just one face replacing another.

A very large lady brought a very large pot of gumbo and some plastic bowls and spoons to the gymnasium just after noon. With all the planning that had gone into that day, no one had thought about how, in a fifteen-hour day, we were going to eat. It was—and is—the only gumbo I’ve had that didn’t come from a restaurant kitchen or a can, and it is still the best I’ve ever eaten.

For once in my life, I was part of something much bigger than myself. This was happening all over the state of Alabama and throughout the country. We were going to eradicate polio.

I knew something about polio. In 1948, the disease hit my home town with a vengeance. The four-year-old who lived on the street behind us contracted it and died. One of the daughters of the family three doors up the street from us was wheeled out on a stretcher, put in an ambulance, and taken to the hospital. She limped for the rest of her life. Polio was like an attacking army, leaving dead and wounded in its wake. The swimming pool and the movie theatre were closed; it wasn’t a good idea to get crowds of people together.

I was shipped off to Blacksburg, Virginia. When the parents there learned I was from North Carolina, they kept their children away from me.

The Salk vaccine, introduced in 1955 had made a big dent in the incidence of polio, and the Sabin vaccine, more effective and delivered orally, was supposed to deliver the knock-out blow. It worked. The incidence of polio in the United States dropped from 3190 in 1960 to 122 in 1964. It continued to drop, and there’s only been one confirmed case of polio in the US in the 21^st century.

The reason for all this remembering is not to take a leisurely stroll down memory lane , but to try to answer a question I’ve been pondering for the past week. The question is how do thoughtful people stare at the same facts and come up with radically different opinions. It’s worse than the three blind men and the elephant.

I have a number of conservative friends. They are not greedy, grasping people. They don’t have horns and tails. and I’m sure that they don’t want anyone to die from lack of health care or food. We engage in prolonged and sometimes complex discussions. They bring facts to their arguments. I try to do the same thing. Yet we disagree on a fundamental question: What is the role of government in solving societies challenges.

None of my friends are as blunt (or as wrong) as the man quoted in the paper this morning who said, “If the government is behind it, it’s going to fail.” About the strongest statement in one of our discussions is that “the government is rarely the solution.”

Then why, if we’re all looking at the same thing and all generally want the same ultimate outcomes, do some of feel that more government involvement is the solution and others believe that less — or no government — involvement is the solution?

The answer I finally came up with is that we are informed by our experiences. I have seen and occasionally been a part of government programs that worked and made our country a better place. While I believe that America’s greatness at any point may well be a matter of where you were standing at that time, I know from my own experience that there have been occasions of greatness when the American government and the American people made history.

I lived through a war where we went from a minor military power with fewer than a half-million citizens under arms to the defender of democracy and winner with more than 12 million under arms. I saw what we did to help salvage the European economy after the war and to supply Berlin during the blockade. After the war, the soldiers came back and went to school and bought homes under the GI Bill. More than 5,000,000 used it to continue their education. They became our teachers, executives, and professionals. The fact that the number of college graduates doubled from before the war to after the war changed our society.

We initiated a space program that put a man on the moon and is still exploring the far reaches of our universe.

Social security, a product of Roosevelt’s New Deal, still provides a bit of security for our oldest and weakest, and Medicare—a part of Johnson’s Fair Deal—works better for me than any private health plan that I’ve had. (And I’m essentially a stress test for any health plan.)

Dwight Eisenhower signed the law to create the Interstate Highway system in 1956 and now we have nearly 50,000 miles of Interstates crossing the nation, and it’s probable that most of our citizens have been on one or more them this week.

Because of the government we’ve managed to abolish official racial and gender discrimination. At least in the eyes of the federal government, all men and women are created equal.

There’s something that all of these successful government programs have in common: not one of them is defensive. They were created to accomplish something rather than to keep others from accomplishing something. (Nit-pickers may want to say that our involvement in WWII was defensive, but what I remember is that we were out to save the world from the Fascists.)

I believe that it isn’t that government programs don’t work, but that it’s that we have allowed a government that serves masters rather than citizens, that we’re more interested in what we can keep others from doing than in what great things we can do, and that the stirring words of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson have become piteous whines and moans about those who are out to get us. It isn’t that government cannot be the answer so much as it’s the government as we’ve defined it has no answers.

To misquote Shakespeare, “the fault, dear Conservative, is not in our government, but in ourselves.” So long as we allow ourselves to be led about by people who have nothing to offer us but shelter from fears, it may well be true that the government is rarely the solution. But my experience is that big, ambitious, and sometimes controversial government programs can work—if you define “work” as creating a better, smarter, and stronger country with greater opportunities for its citizens.

In other words, I believe that the government can, as nearly every other advanced country has done, make certain that all citizens have good health care. It can also provide greater access to all levels of education, from pre-school through secondary to post-secondary, whether that be vocational or college.