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Dec, 15 2010
On March 4, 1933, millions of Americans sat beside their radios
listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivering his first
inaugural address, in which he famously declared that "the only
thing we have to fear is fear itself." (Joe Biden thinks he watched
the speech on television, but that's the subject for an essay in
Current Psychiatry, and this is American Thinker.)
FDR gave Americans the confidence and courage to cope with the
Great Depression, which is among the reasons he's one of our very
greatest presidents.
I hate to say this, but right now the only thing that can save our
country is -- fear itself. Our government is bankrupt, its deficit
is insurmountable, and at both the federal and state levels, we've
run up more debt than can possibly be repaid. This isn't a
political thing; it's a numbers thing. Either everything I've ever
learned about math and economics is wrong, or we're on the verge of
going down. The only possible way to come through safely -- and
even so, the odds are against us -- will be to frighten ourselves so
badly that we'll be willing to do things that in normal times we
simply could not imagine doing.
Let me use a little story to illustrate the effect of fear on human
behavior: Every so often my wife and I look at each other and agree
that it's time to clear out our closets. We're not big shoppers,
but even so, the amount of stuff we accumulate is appalling. Well,
we never quite get the job done. It isn't an emergency; there's
always room to squeeze in one more pair of shoes or sports jacket,
and besides, one day we may actually go to Hawaii, and I'll want
that ghastly shirt my mother bought me 35 years ago.
Now imagine that my wife and I actually are en route to Hawaii, and
halfway across the Pacific, the pilot tells us over the intercom
that there's a bad leak in the fuel tanks: "I hate to say this,
ladies and gentleman, but we've done the calculations up here on the
flight deck and it looks like we won't make it. As I see it,
there's just one chance -- it's a slim chance, but it's all we've
got. If we throw everything we possibly can out the hatch -- and I
mean everything, every item, every ounce -- we just might lighten
the load enough for our remaining fuel to bring us in."
Reader, in thirty seconds we'd be pulling our suitcases out of the
overhead bins and taking off our clothes. If we believed our lives
depended on lightening the load, there isn't one thing we own -- not
one -- that we'd hang onto. (Well, except for my iPad...)
A Word from the Co-Pilot
Now imagine that just as we and the other passengers are stripping
off and handing everything to the crew members manning the aft
hatch, there's a second announcement from the flight deck: "Ladies
and gentlemen, this is the co-pilot. I've done my own calculations,
and I don't think the fuel leak is all that serious. If we just
lighten the load a bit, and gain some altitude, we'll have no
trouble making a safe and on-time landing."
What? How is it possible that the pilot and co-pilot can reach such
different conclusions with the same data? And whom are we
passengers supposed to believe? My guess is that most of us will
choose to believe the co-pilot and go back to whatever we were doing
-- reading, snoozing, watching a movie -- when the pilot scared us
half to death. We won't want to even consider the possibility that
the pilot is correct and that the co-pilot is wrong, or perhaps even
lying to us.
And this is the political jam we're in. It's obvious to anyone
who's looked honestly at the numbers that we're about to go down
into a sea of red ink. You don't need a Nobel Prize in economics to
understand this. All you need is a simple, back-of-the-envelope
calculation to see that the federal government is hemorrhaging money
so fast our economy must inevitably seize up, which will crash the
dollar overseas and turn a national disaster into a global
catastrophe. The financial situation is even worse in states like
California and New York.
And when all this happens, as it must, the unemployment rate will
soar beyond its current miserable level. Millions of working-age
Americans will lose both their jobs and their homes, and millions of
retired Americans will lose the pensions they believed were
guaranteed and which they depend upon to get through each month.
The nation's health care system will collapse for lack of money no
matter what plans the politicians in Washington, D.C., Sacramento,
and Albany concoct. And our children's generation will be condemned
to a standard of living far below what we've enjoyed and come to
believe is our right.
Yet with very few exceptions -- hats off to Senator Tom Coburn and
to the Deficit Commission's two co-chairmen for their straight,
blunt talk -- our political leaders refuse to tell us how bad things
really are. They just keep throwing sand in our eyes so we cannot
see the numbers clearly. Democrats insist that nothing is really
wrong, and that everything would be even better if only "the rich"
would pay "their fair share" of taxes. Republicans generally admit
there's a problem, but in the next breath, they assure us that with
just a bit of tweaking here and there, we'll be okay.
Baloney. We're going down, and it's going to be a ghastly mess.
Indeed, the compromise tax bill these clowns came up with last week
will actually increase the federal debt by $1 trillion in
the coming two years.
And that's why the only thing that can possibly save us now is fear
itself. Not until the majority of voters are so frightened by what
lies ahead that they will support belt-tightening policies that
right now seem intolerable, and vote into office candidates who
cannot get elected now because of one imperfection or another -- but
who have the technical skill and moral courage to make the necessary
spending cuts -- will we have even a chance of landing safely.
Last Words from Lindsey Graham
For obvious reasons, the Democrats won't be willing to frighten
voters. Alas, neither will those of our elected officials who
belong to the GOP establishment. (As we plunge into that sea of red
ink, the last words we'll hear on Earth will be from Lindsey Graham,
telling us how proud and honored he is to have a good working
relationship with Harry Reid.) So who's left to save us? The Tea
Party, that's who. These are the Americans with their heads on
straight, who've done the math and who understand how close we are
right now to catastrophe. These are the men and women who can find
and support candidates who won't play political games, won't agree
to compromises that merely delay the inevitable -- and who will have
the courage to tell voters just how bad things really are. I believe the majority of Americans will respond well to this kind
of apocalyptic politics. But I've been around long enough to know
that not everyone will be willing or able to face reality. And if
this proves to be the case, things are going to get very nasty very
fast. Let's return one more time to my little parable about the
airplane with the leaking fuel tanks: Most of us have tossed
everything out the hatch, and we're in nothing but our underwear.
But there's a chap across the aisle who hasn't moved a muscle. He's
sitting there reading Tom Clancy's latest two-pound thriller; he's
got a seventeen-inch laptop in the seat-back pouch and a backpack
under his feet. When we ask him to help us lighten the load, he
tells us to get lost. Believe me -- the rest of us will have his
stuff out the hatch in a minute, and if the idiot resists, we'll
toss him out the hatch and lighten the load by another two hundred
pounds. Let's hope that things don't get this rough politically, and let's
keep in mind that the surest way to avoid this sort of nastiness
will be to quit playing political games now and to start creating
the majority we'll need to save ourselves. None of us likes the idea of going out and frightening our
neighbors. But fear is a powerful motivator, and sometimes using it
is the only way to make people face reality. We're very nearly out
of time, but this is still the United States, and we Americans have
always managed to accomplish the impossible just when it seemed that
all hope was lost. Can we pull off the impossible one more time?
To borrow a phrase from one of the few politicians who may have the
courage and common sense to bring us in for a safe landing -- you
betcha. |
— Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. His new video is The Siege of Western Civilization.
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