I have found myself participating in several political conversations recently. What follows is a summary of my rumination on those conversations.
Neither
political party has effectively addressed the reality that America must
collectively and individually accept responsibility for national
insolvency: it is not the other guy's fault; it is your fault, and
mine--ours. And the solution requires that all of us tighten our belts
(including politicians: it may be peanuts when measured against the $16
trillion we are in the hole, but why do former Presidents make ~$240,000
per annum guaranteed and adjusted for inflation as long as they live?
where is the panache in pretending that all problems are somebody else's
fault and then stuffing your face on the public dime, using funds that
don't exist?).
We
are all going to lose jobs and/or make a lot less. We can come down
gradually, trying to put some real faith back into our monetary system
(which is currently jacked beyond easy repair)--or we can wait for
another Black Tuesday to take us down for the Great Depression 2.0
(which is still coming regardless of who won the recent elections:
Republicans and Democrats both did this to us, and they did it because
we asked them to; they listened to the public and did their best to give
it what it wanted).
The
biggest problem I have with all this is the inability politicians on
both sides seem to have when it comes to admitting their own mistakes.
Instead of owning those mistakes, they pass the buck to their opponents
and come up with empty plans that all boil down to more of the same:
"We'll simply do what we've always done, but I will be in charge, so it
will work!" As if unserviceable debt were somehow OK under a Republican
(like W) but not under a Democrat (Barack)--or vice versa. Are we
trying to get back to the Reagan years or the Clinton years? In either
event, we are chasing a chimera, and the sooner we recognize this and
snap out of it, the easier our return to the current reality will be.
Clinton and Reagan aren't coming back. They weren't gods. They made
some very human mistakes. Their policies do not promise the utopia that
partisans imagine--no matter how many doors you knock on, how much
"spirit" or "hope" you have, etc. Chasing their shadow is a distraction
from our real problem, which is that as a nation we are currently
living in a fantasy world where we can all have our cake and eat it,
too.
Wall
Street is not too big to fail. It never was, and it never will be.
America is not too big to fail: we've proven it before (when we did fail
and had to work hard to recover), and we are in the process of proving
it again. I wish politicians and the people they represent would man up
and take some freaking responsibility. Maybe I am not personally
wholly responsible for all the crap going on right now, but I am at
least partially to blame. I support (with patronage) businesses and
companies whose practices are unsustainable. I am part of the fragility
inherent in a large global society--the fragility that means that I
could be out of a job tomorrow (at least I am not living in a nation
where that means sudden death, in the literal sense: here I have a
chance to recover, a chance that I should take sooner rather than later
if I want the transition to be smooth). Every day, we all make bets
with the universe. And we all lose sometimes. The key is not to bet
more than you are willing (and able) to lose. You have to take
responsibility for yourself, rather than looking for somebody else (e.g.
Satan, the other political party, "illegal" immigrants, gay people,
rednecks, religious nutjobs, racists, etc.). We are all just
human beings, dumb human beings who make mistakes (no matter who is
leading us: our leaders are human, too).
If
the American dream is about other people making you happy, then it is
an impossible fantasy (no matter who you are, how you vote, or who wins
any election). If you want your dreams to be real, then you have to
dream something that might be real (as the really good dreamers in our
history have consistently done: where are they now? why do they never
get elected to public office? maybe because we don't appreciate them
until after they are dead?). Maybe we need somebody to tell us honestly
what we really look like, as a people. Maybe we don't look much like
the kind of heroes we seem to expect our politicians to be. Maybe we
shouldn't expect more of them than we do of ourselves. Maybe we should
set our personal standards a bit higher. Change and hope don't come
from other people. The way is not in heaven, not through election, not
in the system outside you: the way is in the depths of your heart, yours
and mine. We need to go there and face what we see (the way some of us
already do, some of us who are not winning or losing elections, some of
us who are too busy suffering to care about finding somebody else to
blame).
In offering these reflections, I
am not putting myself forward as the ideal American. I personally at
this time see myself as more part of the problem than the solution. I
am not in a position to save myself and my family. I have not put
myself in that position. I have kept my head down and done what I was
told, and I rely on other people a lot, probably too much. Mitt Romney
was right to call me parasite, I guess I am saying; where he is wrong is
in supposing that he escapes the same blame. He is playing the game he
was born into, just like I am, and (as far as I can tell) losing it the
same way (even though he was born with a better hand). We are all in
this together, and we all (or most of us, anyway) suck (at least some of
the time). We need to accept this, I think, and recognize that our
suckiness has and will have consequences that will make our lives and
our children's lives different than they would have been otherwise.
I
will not tell my kids that their lives will be better than mine. I
don't believe that. I think it is wrong to set people up with false
expectations, to tell them that someone else will look out for them
always, that there exists a path to meaningful happiness that is not
paved with their own blood, sweat, and tears--blood, sweat, and tears that might ultimately yield nothing
(or at least, nothing like what they expect when they set foot on the
path). There are no guarantees. There is no sure hope. I wish
politicians would just say that (tell us the truth), and then do their
best to let us see how they are making bets with our best
interests--bets that might fail, bets against which we personally need
to take out insurance, on our own: no program can take all the risk and
make it disappear, no matter who runs it. God himself could not redeem
this people, or if he could, then he almost certainly will not, if
history is any indicator: he will sit back and let things be however
they turn out.
