The adage, “Forewarned is Forearmed,” sounds great, but only if the warnings are heard and heeded. For the last several decades America has resolutely ignored warnings of all kinds. This isn’t exactly something new.
Churchill is supposed to have said that “the Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” To be fair, this was after waiting for over two years after the invasion of Poland — September 1, 1939 —for the Yanks to join the fight against Hitler when Britain stood alone.
Roosevelt did manage to create the Lend-Lease program to help arm the embattled Brits, but the Republicans and the America First movement sympathetic to the Nazis opposed entering the war. It took Pearl Harbor to change the equation. An immense economic and military mobilization followed.
After a brief pause at the end of the war, a similar urgency seized the country which mixed the need to rearm with new weapons for a Cold War and to retool for a consumer economy juiced by the baby boom and pent up demand due to almost two decades of depression and wartime rationing.
Suddenly everything was in demand — homes, schools, roads, diapers, food, clothes, appliances, autos and new products previously unknown including television, ballistic missiles and H-bombs. The economy was also swelled by international demand from country’s recovering from the destruction of their infrastructure and means of production.
The boom times couldn’t last forever, of course. As competition resumed from Europe and emerged due to an Asian miracle, American prosperity faced challenges. Some should have been anticipated, but complacency had made us overconfident. We also suffered self-inflicted wounds like the costly and doomed Vietnam War. While we defended the postwar order, competitors profited.
Ever since the 1970s, we have been slow to change and reluctant to face the necessity. Political parties have ossified around the vested interests of their particular constituents. Instead of being forewarned, we have been blindsided
Oil shocks stunned us. The collapse of the Soviet Union came as a complete surprise to the CIA despite an annual budget in the tens of billions. The rise of China to its present power also amazed, even though it was enabled by us. Al Qaeda came out of a clear blue sky to destroy symbols of American military and economic power. The internet disrupted and made obsolete whole industries overnight.
Not only were we unprepared for these surprising challenges but too often we reacted to threats we should have seen coming in half-cocked, half-baked, counterproductive ways that made the problems worse. We have spent decades living in a Billy Joel song:
“Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
“Wheel of Fortune”, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law
Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore.”
The Wake-Up Calls keep ringing but no one’s answering. Domestically it has been obvious since the baby boomers were born, beginning in 1946 that they would eventually become a huge challenge for Social Security, Medicare and other government-funded programs, especially as the next generations and hence the taxpaying workforce grew smaller. We have had fair warning for decades, but action has been postponed because older voters would have to be denied benefits they were promised or younger voters forced to pay higher taxes to meet the need. Instead, debt and deficit.
The same refusal to act when tough choices can be postponed has meant the growing problem of income inequality that can undermine a society, and the lack of needed investment in education, R & D, infrastructure and other social and economic goods. We were once a country that prided itself on being like the industrious Ant of the fable, not the indolent Grasshopper.
We have been forewarned forever about the danger of debt, yet every time a Republican administration arrives, under the spell of the supply side fantasy, billions in debt and deficit are put on the tab for the next Democrat to pay off (spendthrifts) and take the blame for (socialists). The Trump administration, like those of Reagan and Bush before it, is doing it again. Someday soon, we all are likely to pay a steep price for it, and not just in money but in competitiveness
Enemies we no longer seem to take seriously, indeed are in bed with, like China and Russia, are amusedly watching Lenin’s prophecy come true. “The capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them with.” And looming above all the rest of the dangers we are ignoring, the warnings we haven’t bothered to heed, is climate change.
It too is another peril that has been obvious for decades and has been denied because admitting its reality would require us to change the way we live, would cost powerful vested interests a buck, demand government to make hard, unpleasant choices. Better to take the campaign contributions today and face the music tomorrow.
But by the time the waters have risen, the mass migrations have reached our shores, the crops no longer grow and the emerging plagues are killing us it will be too late. We have decided to be like the World War II British draftees forced to drill with broomsticks because the government had failed to produce enough rifles to face a modern mechanized blitzkrieg.
Wake Up!
This may help. Try reading “Climate change will cost us more than we think.” by Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern, NYTimes Oct. 23. It explains that while climate scientists report change is happening faster than previously calculated, economists have also miscalculated. Their cost estimates for dealing wth climate change have fallen victim to a reliance on “stationarity,” the basing of forecasts on pst experience.
But in a disruptive case like climate change, the past is not a useful guide to the future. Humankind has no experience with change of this magnitude. Fluctuations within a narrow range will be replaced by unprecedented shifts in temperature, rainfall, sea level rise, biodiversity disruptions, crop yields, water supply.
Costs for contaminated water, flooded coastal cities, mass migrations, famine, malnutrition, emerging disease, disrupted trade, lack of access to raw materials cannot be calculated. Are we ready? Of course not. Forewarned is only forearmed if you bother to believe the warning and arms yourself.