Worst-Case Scenario
As a species, we have a habit of expecting that the worst thing possible is exactly what will happen, if for no other reason than it so seldom does. This mental preparation – to expect abject terror, defeat, or sorrow – makes it so that when things are nominal, or average, or so-so, we are relieved.
It is this sort of mental rigor that has built our society into the danger-enabling machine it is. We have airbags in our steering columns because we expect to get thrashed head-on by a bus. When we don’t – when, instead, we poke out into an intersection on a close yellow light and get into a wreck – we think, It could have been worse. My car is totaled, but at least I’m not bleeding from the eyes.
It is a strange way to live. We assume the worst will happen so we guard against it. We structure our days for disaster and are thankful when it doesn’t come. We build patterns of carelessness, because so long as we don’t blow through a station wagon full of nuns at roughly the speed of light, we’ll probably be okay.
The problem is accountability. If cars came with 15-inch railroad spikes in the steering columns instead of downy, supple air bags, our attitude towards vehicular safety would change considerably. No more zipping in and out of traffic. No more making it through intersections by mere inches on our way to the mall. No more intense cell phone conversations while doing 90 on I-35. Now we deal with accountability of a tangible sort. Now we hang up and use turn signals.
This is not the case.
Government embraces the same false sense of immunity. Standards are re-ordered to create two categories of consequence: death or awesome. Anything other than sheer obliteration is acceptable and usually hailed as a success. I posit that the reason the American public took so long to notice the wheels were off the wagon is because government lives like we do. Hell, the government is us.
Wars get rougher by the day although we are told things are going swimmingly. Politicians paint themselves as defenders of freedom and righteousness and then participate in fraud, or help business marginalize the American worker, or sell out CIA operatives.
With Katrina, we witnessed a worst-case scenario. We knew it when we watched the news and felt slightly guilty that our homes weren’t under 8 feet of water and our relatives weren’t stuck in attics. It was the tragedy we’d been preparing for, so we were able to process it.
In the weeks that followed, several hundred dead became an upshot; those predicting worse were painted as hysterical fatalists. I was not surprised when the tens of thousands of shattered lives got a fresh coat of media paint as a group of people on the long road to recovery, ready to enter the Ownership Society. I was not startled that very little was made of the fact that these people lived in crushing poverty to begin with and now faced nature-made gentrification.
Even facing total disaster, the impact wasn’t hard enough to immediately trigger a metaphorical face-full of cold, unforgiving consequence for government. As citizens and voters, it remains to be seen whether we have the will to wield the Flaming Sword of Rebuke.
I doubt we do. The same old song is playing, and the new bosses will probably look an awful lot like the old ones in 2006. The days of Nixon, after all, are over.
