The Long-Term Impact of a Crisis Mentality
It seems counter-intuitive, yet the occasional crisis brings out the best in us. Hurricanes, famines, flooding – these and so much more summon nobler instincts in us and successfully prod us out of our preoccupation to see a larger world around us. Whether devastation in the Bahamas or forest fires destroying entire communities, such calamities, instead of causing us to shrink in insecurity, actually draw us together in all ways truly human. My own city was recently hit by a number of explosions that destroyed various properties and yet somehow induced a response of such compassion that we barely knew we had it in us. Such things are what crises can do for us.
And it’s not all about local afflictions. Images of a burned-out cathedral in Paris or tribes forced to leave their Brazilian homelands in the face of forest fires not only draw out our emotions but our wallets as well. People faraway who we will never meet in order to form emotional attachments nevertheless remind us of our humanity and cause us to reach out to the stranger.
Perhaps it’s just all that new technology today, but many sense that disasters are now far more frequent and increasingly costly in lives lost. Hardly a day passes without headlines calling for us to pay attention to this or that cataclysm and participate in recovery efforts.
Yet it seems like the more such events occur, the larger picture recedes inevitably into the background. We have increasingly ignored those trends that speak of the long game – carbon reduction, poverty, low-income housing, obesity, physical infrastructure, joblessness, the struggle for survival of small businesses, what appears as the saddening decline of democracy, just to name a few.
What is the common theme running through these broader issues? Public and private investment. Had we taken to properly resourcing such efforts decades ago, we likely wouldn’t be facing the lingering crises we are today. But instead we permitted the alluring promises from political parties of lower taxes, less sacrifice and the passing off of our deeper problems to our children and we continued, election after election, to reward those parties who offered us short-term gain and the inevitable long-term pain.
Consider how we’ve handled poverty. Increasing amounts of our fellow citizens who fall into low-income levels each year are actually working, often attempting to hold down two minimum wages jobs. We grew increasingly unaware of the poverty blight in all our attention to material advantage for ourselves. Where we once heard that old adage, “the poor will always be with us,” we have now added to it that the rich will always accompany us as a society as well. We have permitted the gap between the middle and upper classes to get totally out of proportion. And as more and more wealth accrues to the financially advantaged, we discover that they are not so willing to invest in our greatest abiding problems.
That reality means that we have left any real solutions to the public sector. The Great Recession should have reminded us that public funds bailing out financial institutions only works if those firms express their gratitude, and reinvest their benefit back into society to help it overcome the shock created by their own short-sightedness. It didn’t happen and now the public sector has less resources than ever to pour resources into our long-term hurdles.
As crisis after crisis emerges, we as a people still reveal a remarkable ability to adapt and assist those in need. It is one of the greatest traits of humanity.
But one of our debilitating difficulties has been our inability to keep our collective eye on the longer-term problems building up just outside of our attention. We hear increasing yearnings for “solutions” to our joint dilemmas, all the while failing to acknowledging that it was our preoccupations in the past that has led to the call for solutions today. Timely investments, better political choices, a deeper understanding into the responsibilities of citizenship – individual and collective – would have, to a far greater degree, helped us to avoid the endemic challenges of the present.
The world still mostly runs on fossil fuels and we know the damage that does to our future and confirm it in every poll. And yet we personally fail to make the personal and pubic investments that will wean us off such dependency. Governments fail to take it seriously and citizens continue to voice their grievances whenever the price of fuel rises or a carbon tax on such consumption is floated. We know such sacrifices are required if we are to recover but we just can’t bring ourselves to make them. That’s as true for political parties as it is for the voters.
All this mania about the dysfunctions of our current politics, and the incessant coverage of things like Brexit, Donald Trump or political scandals in the media, has left us with one deeply disturbing truth – democracy is no longer about the sustainable future but the manic present. The very political platform meant to move us forward in progress has now trapped us in the decline of the present.
And yet the great compassion and generosity of people in emergency situations continues to abide and impress. We still have the potential for sacrifice, but have lost our way in building it into our permanent plans. If that doesn’t change, and quickly, our deeper problems will come home to roost.