Try to relax and enjoy the crisis.
- Ashleigh Brilliant
We’re in such a slump that even the ones that are drinking aren’t hitting.
- Casey Stengel
Famine. Pestilence. War. Epic, seemingly never-ending flooding. Global climate change. The Packers winning the Super Bowl. Yes, these truly are the times that test the souls and the constitutions of men. Just when you might reasonably begin to think that things couldn’t POSSIBLY get any worse…they prove you wrong and achieve as yet unplumbed depths of epic suckage. The recession to end all recessions wasn’t enough. Greece (and Ireland, Iceland, Spain, and California) teetering on the brink of default wasn’t enough. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates being in first place in the NL Central wasn’t enough. Actually, there’s no telling what will be enough, and when things will hit bottom and begin to trend upwards.
I’m not trying to pee in anyone’s sandbox here, but in case you haven’t noticed, things aren’t going so well…unless you happen to be one of the wealthy oligarchs who walk among the unwashed masses seemingly unaffected by whatever travails happen to befall lesser mortals. Yes, I’ve been around the bend a few times, and I can say with some confidence that the global suckage index (which, in case you were wondering, I just now made up out of whole cloth) has hit levels never before seen since Neanderthals discovered that clubbing their rivals to death was a killer way to settle arguments.
Yeah, I know; not much has changed, right? Still, you might ask, what makes for such epic suckage? Well, funny that you should ask that. I don’t necessarily have and answers, but here’s my (not necessarily exhaustive and/or comprehensive) list that I’m offering only for purposes of illustration:
- The US debt ceiling crisis. Do we REALLY need to talk about that any more?
- China’s economy is proving to not be quite the impregnable juggernaut we’d previously thought it was.
- Europe is suffering continent-wide street protests amid the worst debt crisis in the EU’s history.
- Uber-Christian theocrats want nothing more than to turn America into and ultra-Jesus-y remake of Jesus Camp.
- Japan achieved a seldom-accomplished trifecta- earthquake, tsunami, AND catastrophic radiation leak. Yay, nuclear energy!!
- Libya is at war with itself. At least it seems to be; a bunch of people are shooting at each other and scores are dying…and yet no one seems to be in charge.
- Yemen is imploding. Or burning. Or something. No one really knows what, because the two foreign correspondents in country are entertainment reporters who took a wrong turn on their way to a Bollywood film festival in Delhi…and they don’t know al-Qaeda from Al Jolson.
- Syria, one of the world’s most repressive regimes, is in open rebellion, but no one really knows. All the government will say is that no, they haven’t seen Waldo.
- As usual, Pakistan is a complete freakin’ mess- militarily, economically, and politically.
- A nuclear-armed North Korea is ruled by an ever-more unstable ruler who apparently shot a 47 (for 18 holes) the first time he ever played golf.
- Our oceans are dying…perhaps because we keep pouring all manner of toxic ick into the water. Hey, the stuff’s gotta go somewhere, right??
I could go on, of course, but I think this list, such as it is, illustrates my point quite nicely. The question, I suppose is why now, and why seemingly all at once? Could it be that far too many years of kicking the can down the road on a global scale is finally catching up with us? Have we simply forestalled dealing with the truly unpleasant, difficult, and thorny questions for far too long…and now the bill for our procrastination is coming due? Looking at the world around me, it’s difficult to find an answer other than, “Hell, yes!”
Big structural problems like these — from how goverments and economic institutions are set up and managed, to writing and enforcing laws that actually work, to establishing transparent processes that make companies, financial markets and political systems more accountable and more efficient — are notoriously difficult to tackle.
And that’s true from Washington, to Brussels, Beijing, Tokyo, Tunis and beyond.
So expect a long, hot and uncomfortable summer around the world. And probably a frightening fall, a worrisome winter, and an uncertain spring to follow.
I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade early on a Monday morning, but let’s think about what those of us in (something resembling) functional democracies do. We elect those who pontificate, who present easy solutions to complex problems, and who validate our already closely-held prejudices (et tu, Herman Cain??). Thinkers- people who truly understand that the problems we face are difficult (but not impossible) to solve and may well require difficult choices- often don’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of being elected. We want simple. We want easy. We refuse to understand, much less accept, that the world we live in is bedeviled by problems that are neither simple nor easy to address and resolve.
This would, I suppose, explain American politicians like Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert…none of whom ever met an issue they couldn’t pander to their knuckle-dragging base about. Meanwhile here in the fact- and evidence-based world, those smart and honest enough to look for real solutions to very real problems are marginalized and treated as eggheads (come on down, Paul Krugman!!). Evidently, and sadly, this is not a purely and exclusively American phenomenon. On a global scale, we’ve put off dealing with intractable structural problems which, if they’d be dealt with early on, might have been simpler to resolve had only the will to do so existed.
There’s a theory I’ve heard espoused that holds that our world must pass through this cycle of chaos in order to get to a place where things will be better. The problem with that theory, of course, is that it presupposes that people will be smarter and more intellectually and philosophically honest. As much as I’d like to believe that, it’s hard to look around me and think that things will really be any different, because our world is increasingly beginning to resemble the set from Idiocracy. The optimist in me wants to believe that things will be different, that we’ll wake up one morning and realize the error of our ways. Unfortunately, the realist in me understands that as long as we’re dealing with human beings, greed, self-interest, and propaganda will tend to carry the day.
So, yeah, things do tend to look the blackest before they really, really suck….