Pooh and Piglet

“When walking round the tree with Piglet and seeing all the footsteps, Pooh and Piglet became frightened, convinced that they were following a threatening creature, but they misread the evidence, they were only following their own footprints.” 

 The economic crisis we now face is marked with our own footprints. David Brooks, New York Times columnist, explains it: “This crisis has many currents, which merge and feed off each other. There is the lack of consumer demand, the credit crunch, the continuing slide in housing prices, the freeze in business investment, the still hefty consumer debt levels and the skills mismatch — not to mention regulatory burdens, the business class’s utter lack of confidence in the White House, the looming explosion of entitlement costs, the public’s lack of confidence in institutions across the board.”

Just how have we made these footprints?  First we’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that happiness only comes from consumption.  Second, we used up enormous amounts of credit to feed our acquisitive habits.  Third, we believed that a 20 percent annual increase in home values could continue forever.  Fourth, we failed to match educational programs with the needs of new industries.  Consequently, we graduate people with  barely marketable skills. Fifth, we went to extremes in regulating some industries and removed regulations from the industries that caused the financial crash.  Sixth, we didn’t plan ahead to fill the financial demands of the retiring Baby Boomers, the largest cohort in the history of the world.  Seventh, we believe politicians who promise to fix our problems with simplistic solutions communicated in sound-bites.  Ninth and most important, we never look beyond the present crisis.

These footprints are not the result of anything unusual. Instead of acknowledging that, we distract ourselves with the blame game:  It’s this president’s fault.  It’s the last president’s fault.  It’s fault of the super-rich.  It’s the fault of the welfare class.  We are like Pooh and Piglet in retrospect: with all these unrecognized footprints there must be a threatening creature somewhere.

Pogo, another cartoon character had something profound to say on this topic: We’ve seen the enemy and it’s us.  And I’m not saying that we did anything immoral.  We just succumbed to the message of more, more, more, with credit, credit and more credit.  Now the bill is due.

I’m not minimizing the seriousness of our economic woes. But there is a vast difference between the lowest income U.S. citizens and the street people in Brazil.  There is a vast difference between wearing last year’s fashions and begging for alms.  There is a vast difference between struggling to balance a household budget and selling your children  because you can’t afford to feed them.

From Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

So while you make your voting decisions listen deeply to who is claiming that these footprints were made by a threatening creature, namely President Obama.  Think about who is promoting “fear” instead of the new ideas needed to correct our economic problems.

From Neal Gabler, Annenberg Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California:  “Ideas aren’t what they used to be.  Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world….It’s not a secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle […]in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy.”

In my words, when we have a firm belief in everything we think no new ideas can emerge. In particular, opinion and orthodoxy brought us here.  They won’t get us out. 

Robert DeFilippis