Bob Henline strikes again, but this time there is nothing he said that I would argue with.
. . . all we end up doing is enacting more ridiculous laws that only spin the problems, never really resulting in any tangible effects. That leads us to ask the question of why this is the case?
The short answer to this question is that we lack anything resembling long-term thinking in this country. Our politicians have shelf-lives of 2, 4, or 6 years and our general public has an attention spam of about 12 seconds. This situation doesn’t lend itself well to long-term solutions, but it does lead to amazing long-term problems. Over the course of the past 50 years or so we have done an amazing job of creating problems and of pushing them off onto future generations. The problem that we now face is that we are the future generation that is stuck with the tab.
Politicians have short shelf lives – they view things within the context of terms – make the solution within their limited term and the only requirement is that the solution must move the problem outside the limited scope of the current term. They may talk about longer terms but they act within that short framework. Notice that this same type of short-term “anything for quarterly or annual profits in order to drive my bonus” mentality among bankers (often among those who were not even at the very top) was a major factor that drove us to the verge of financial ruin. Those we were used to calling investors had generally become nothing more than speculators.
In contrast to politicians, statesmen are defined as those who look ahead to the lasting effects of their actions. They work very hard to craft something that will be around longer than they could ever hope to live. The statesmen who founded our nation produced something that has survived (in a battered form) for over two centuries. Our politicians today do nothing that will not be tweaked, altered, or overhauled within 15 years.
Here is how I describe the daunting job that real statesmen in our day must undertake – they must be willing to sacrifice two, four, or six years at a time with no promise of being re-elected for their efforts, willing to roll back the band-aids of the past to uncover the real problems and apply real solutions regardless of how popular they are (committed to work very hard to help the rest of the people understand why they are making those tough choices), willing to live with potentially a lifetime of being misunderstood for the actions that were necessary for their probably very short term in office.
Can anyone honestly say that they are willing to take on that job description – willing to enter politics (which is naturally a very bruising enterprise as I said earlier) with the willingness to go one-and-done if people fail to recognize the true value of their work?
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