Not Dealing

You could call it another kind of denial. I call it “not dealing”: refusing to come to terms with problems you know are severe and consequen-tial. This country is the world’s champ at not dealing.

Here are a few current examples—and how some have tried to penetrate the veil of neglect.

Obama’s speech on race was a stirring wake-up call that many insisted on sleeping through.

We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

Indeed, the Wright tape has become the news instead of the speech. It’s much easier to deal with than the issues Obama brought up.

We are also discovering (with dismay) the deeper connections between oil prices, housing, the financial system and the economy in general. These linkages, causes and effects will be hard for Americans to acknowledge and harder still to deal with.

“Now, the shadow banking system is facing the 21st-century equivalent of the wave of bank runs that swept America in the early 1930s,” says Paul Krugman, and all the rescue money that’s been proposed could be the “quid without the quo.” Meaning, where’s the requisite bank regulation that will prevent this from happening again? And where are the candidates with their reform proposals?

You remember Katrina. What money the feds did provide was siphoned off in corrupt scams, bureaucratic ineptitude and—the U.S. specialty—lack of follow-through. Even now, the country is unable to come to terms with the magnitude of the disaster, much less help those still suffering.

In Iraq we refuse to admit defeat and talk in vague, hallucinatory terms about “winning” and “victory” instead of creating bona fide contingency plans to exit. People seem to be so frustrated and ill-informed about the war that they finally just don’t want to deal with it.

Maybe a few more sincere mea culpas (pace Hillary Clinton) would help wake people up. Conservative Andrew Sullivan wrote a moving piece about his change of heart. Strong words and apparently a first step on his road to dealing with the tragic realities of this war:

. . . I never believed that America would do what America has done. Never. My misjudgment at the deepest moral level of what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were capable of—a misjudgment that violated the moral core of the enterprise—was my worst mistake. What the war has done to what is left of Iraq—the lives lost, the families destroyed, the bodies tortured, the civilization trashed—was bad enough. But what was done to America—and the meaning of America—was unforgivable. And for that I will not and should not forgive myself.

Comments

[Erica]

Agreed our country has completely gone to pot. Andrew Sullivan couldn't be more right about the Administration ruining our country... can I be Naive and Idealistic and suggest that the next Dem. pres (aka Barry Hussein) will turn us around?