A Failure of Imagination

I think I'm moving into one of my periodic jaded phases.  Jaded with the news, which isn't actually new, and  that doesn't seem to do much good even when you know it.

For instance, two pieces today that are cogent, timely and "important."  One is a not untypical column by Robert Reich that spells out exactly what's been happening in the U.S. economy for the past 50 years, and what has to happen to get it to work as well as it was working for a lot of people. Which by the way was hardly perfect.

The other is an even better column by the usually cogent E.J. Dionne, but this is exceptionally eloquent and timely.  It begins: "While the United States remains utterly frozen in a debate about budget deficits and all the things that government shouldn’t do, other countries are marrying public and private resources to make themselves stronger and more competitive."

He continues: While other countries have jumped ahead of us in green economics, we have backed away from any effort to put a price on carbon to battle climate change and promote new technologies. In the Republican Party, politicians have to apologize for even thinking about global warming.

And while other countries invest in their basic facilities, we are letting our broadband access, roads and bridges, and rail and water systems go to seed. We created the interstate highway system, and now we can’t maintain our sewers.

Oh, yes, and nearly 14 million of our fellow citizens are unemployed.

He notes the corporate leaders as well as not-for-profit organizations that know this in some detail.  He ends:

You might recall an observant politician who noted this year that “South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a ‘D.’ ”

A few months later, the same politician said: “We don’t have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit investment in our people and our country.”

That would be President Obama, and you wonder: Is there any chance that he can move our national conversation to the task of “winning the future”?

Good question.  And good analysis--"Our imagination deficit is the shortfall we should worry about. We seem incapable of doing what we did in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and, yes, Nixon years: imagining how practical public action could make our citizens’ lives better, our country stronger and our private economy more productive."

Yes, it is a failure of the imagination.  Not a failure to imagine--certain of us can imagine all kinds of things, like the Rapture, like things they hear that nobody actually said, etc.  But a failure to apply perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the human species and one of our greatest (and only) survival advantages: the ability to imagine and especially to imagine the future, in a way that synthesizes and analyzes present reality and past experience.

But these days the main audience for such analyses as Reich's and Dionne's seem likely to be those mythical astropologists from another star system, digging around in our ruins.

See what I mean?  Jaded.