"This economy is in the toilet and the employees of [the school district] simply refuse to ride out this storm with us. They want the lifeboats, while we go down with the ship."

"There should be absolutely no raises until the economy stabilizes and begins to improve. The public servants should be content with having a job - unlike so many in the private sector."

— Two recent reader comments on the Mail Tribune Web site

"This will be the third contract in recent years in which state employees have agreed to a pay freeze"¦ Let's support our state employees. They have already sacrificed enough."

— Letter to the Mail Tribune, March 1

I can't be the only one who recently remembered Strother Martin's classic line from "Cool Hand Luke": "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

More than a few public employees are vocally unhappy that a whopping state budget deficit might mean losing a few work days, along with annual cost-of-living or "step" raises that usually reward satisfactory performance. The current hyperventilating is triggered by a fiscal crisis that seems to grow almost every day, but the Failure to Communicate goes back decades. Public employees have been the whipping post for every citizen frustration from the complexity of income tax returns to the red tape of building permits to long post office lines to, it sometimes seems, gloomy Oregon weather in January. They're tired of it. Most of them work hard and don't appreciate cartoon-like tales of highway workers leaning on their shovels. Most of them are pretty good at what they do and resent sweeping pronouncements about government's innate incompetence. Most of them think the bulk of complaining Oregon citizens amplify half-truths and rumors and don't understand how government really works.

Some Oregon taxpayers say they're not the ones who don't understand. They see public employees as the one sector held comparatively harmless through the economy's rough patches, expecting yearly pay increases, ample pensions and quality health coverage as their natural birthright. They bristle at well-publicized instances where public retirees are paid more than they made when they were working, mostly from tax dollars. That peculiarity by itself has been known to launch tiny bits of foam from the mouths of otherwise mild-mannered citizens, and probably explains the passage of some anti-tax measures that — how to say this? — weren't wonderfully well thought-out.

Public employees respond that those retirees making 100+ percent of their ending salaries are rare anomalies that happen to make flashy front-page stories, and that they're an odd outcome of years of contract negotiations that drew big concessions from both sides. You have to understand the history of all this, they say, along with the central trade-off: Public employees have chosen security in employment, retirement and health care over the higher compensation available in the private sector.

That generalization was accurate in the 1970s, and at least arguable through the 1990s. Not anymore. It's hard to imagine a public employee with even a tenuous grip on reality arguing that they're giving up higher-paying opportunities in the current economy. But then it's hard to imagine anyone arguing, as layoffs, foreclosures, bankruptcies and hunger snowball around us, that losing 2 to 3 percent of their workdays and salary is a cruel and unbearable burden. But we're hearing that.

It's easy to bang on the handful of public employees quoted in recent reports who seem clueless about what's going on in the world. But they didn't bring about this mess, and unless we enjoy this endless public/private-sector squabble, we better understand what did. There's no single cause, but here's one to remember: Eight years of national policy that embraced Ronald Reagan's maxim ("Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem") while squandering the public wealth on crony contracts, faith-based economics that pretended that upper-class tax cuts made life better for everyone, and a deceptively sold war too unpopular to ask Americans to pay for.

Now we are paying, for all of it, in ways we never imagined and ways we still can't. We can roll our eyes at tone-deaf comments from people who seem impervious to the pain growing around them. But let's try to keep our eyes lifted to the road ahead. As I write these words, the new administration is handing another $30 billion to the privately held insurer AIG (whose total draw from the trough is expected to reach $200 billion), and laying plans to nearly double military forces in Afghanistan, for purposes that few find clear. When we choose all that, or let it be chosen for us, we're choosing more public-service poverty at home, the kind that's dividing us right now. When we get tired of assigning blame on the back end, maybe we'll figure out how to choose differently on the front.

Jeff Golden is the author of "Forest Blood," "As If We Were Grownups," and the recently released novel "Unafraid," with excerpts available at www.unafraidthebook.com.