Easy Street
There’s a road near my office called Easy Street. I don’t know if it’s the real name of the road (I suspect it isn’t) because there isn’t a street sign, just a big stone mailbox with a pretty painted tile that says “Easy St” in the yard at the corner of the T intersection. I wonder how often they pull up after a hard or long day and roll their eyes at their own unofficial street sign.
People have a tendency to be optimistic. It’s true. You may watch the news, listen to talk radio, or read a blog and think I am crazy to say this, that the world is full of cynics and pessimists. Well, it is. As contradictory as that sounds, there’s a piece which connects the two: people are optimistic that there is a solution, but pessimistic as to whether that solution will actually be put into place.
Unfortunately, what I’m complaining about today is the optimism. Too frequently peoples’ desire to see the world as a potential utopia blinds them to reality.
The particular example I’d like to point out is America’s debt crisis. The right thing to do is reign in spending, stop printing money, let interest rates rise and even default, if necessary. A typical talking head on a mainstream opinion show would look at you aghast if you proposed these measures. “Why, that would be a disaster for the economy!” True, it would be, you might concede, right before pointing out that we’re headed for a bigger disaster anyway.
It is incomprehensible to some people that some pain might be necessary, and attempting to avoid it might just make things worse. If you’ve got a life-threatening tumor and require a painful procedure to remove it, you’ve only got two choices, both of them painful. Sometimes there just isn’t an easy way out.
Posted by wobbles on Thursday, September 08, 2011