Why We Really Aren’t Doing That Badly

All you have to do these days is watch the news programs to wonder if the only real option left to us is a goodbye note and some razor blades. Depending upon your political bent, you can watch one news channel that will tell you that Obama and his sneaky cronies are stealing away your freedom, and running the country to utter financial ruin. Or you can watch another channel that tells you the partisanship of the Tea Partiers and the ultra-conservative Right are killing any hope for a beleaguered country reeling from years of free-wheeling big business running Washington. The family is threatened, our religious freedom is threatened, taxes are taking over, lobbyists own the halls of our government…

I call myself a liberal-leaning moderate, so I tend to fall for the left rhetoric sooner than the right rhetoric. But I try – I do try very hard – to look at all sides and examine the reality which is located somewhere in the middle where nobody’s looking right now. And what I see is really not as bad as either side is painting it.

Consider this. Even in our current economic times, the U.S. is the leading producer of goods in the world, bar none. Even China, with a GDP that has grown in leaps and bounds in the last decade cannot hope to achieve the levels of production our country has reached. In 2007, the U.S. was producing fully twenty percent of the world’s goods with only five percent of the world’s population. China, its next closest producer, produced only five percent of the world’s goods with twenty percent of the world’s population.

Yes, we’ve experienced a downturn, but economic indicators reveal that we are still the most powerful player in the world market. Without our production and consumer goods, and without our investment dollars in other countries, the world’s economic picture would be very much bleaker. Even in our current economic state we are shoring up the economies other nations throughout the world. We not only produce consumer goods, but we provide production goods for other countries so that they can produce their own consumer goods and in turn supply more of our needs. We invest in other countries’ economies by purchasing their production goods and using their cheaper labor for jobs no longer viable on U.S. soil.
Even with our unemployment stats in double-digits, as they are currently, we still employ the largest work force in the world. A workforce that is the most industrialized and educated, despite what we realize is a less than optimal educational system. And even our poorest citizens enjoy common goods and services that the poor in other countries can only dream about. Even our homeless can receive a decent meal and a bed in just about any community. Even our garbage is of higher quality.

This is not meant to be a ‘bragfest’ on the U.S. Certainly we have many failures and cracks in our systems that need our immediate attention. We have become complacent in our giant status and sometimes we look the other way when it comes to addressing human rights and equity. We desperately need tax reform. On either side of the political aisle we can point fingers and show statistics that look quite appalling as they are presented.

But I posit to you that despite all of that, the worst problem we Americans have right now is our lack of hope and belief in ourselves. We look at where we are now and, depending upon our political leanings, begin to say there’s too much government and Obama’s trying to make us a socialist nation, or conversely, there’s not enough government and the selfish corporate power-mongers are running over the little man and trying to make us a dictatorship run by Wall Street. See? Either way, you’re right….and you’re wrong.

Historically, this recession is no worse than the one we suffered after the Great Depression. Because of governmental safeguards in place now that weren’t back then, the same economic conditions that practically brought us to ruin in the 30’s can exist without causing the same level of damage. And if you look at our pattern of rising and falling economies, this is just a ‘correction’, a dip in the ebb and flow of our ‘business as usual’ economy. Why does it seem so bad this time? Because it is one of the bigger dips – inevitable but not world-ending. Also, because our economy is now so closely tied to the world market, a dip here causes market dips everywhere else, in markets not quite as able to withstand as we are. That makes it seem even more ominous.

Will we survive it? Yes. Is it because, as some might say, we have become an evil, godless nation of self-seekers who need to be brought down a notch or two? Is it because we have allowed our government to take over our economy and kill our free market? Is it because our free market was too free? Or because Communists, or whoever the evil-power-du-jour may be, are taking over our government from within? No. We are in a market fall right now because that’s what our economy does. It may not do it to this extent every time, and there are people on Wall Street, in the banking and real estate industry who carry at least some of the responsibility for how bad it has gotten this time.

But if we continue to listen to the pundits breathing doom and gloom, we cost ourselves precious recovery time. If industry continues to take what should be considered unethical advantage of the current economy to get cheap loans and sit on the money, keeping their own empires intact while the common worker without such a soft pillow to land on hits the ground hard, we will not recover as quickly or efficiently. Government will of necessity have to continue stepping in to force the pocketbooks open and free up the clog in the market machine, and/or pass regulation to prevent a repeat performance. People who are anti-government will react with venom and suspicion, attacking without really knowing who to attack. Those who believe governmental regulation is the only answer will push for reforms that have potential to further stagnate the market.

What we all – and I do mean all – really need to do is go on with our business and tone down the rhetoric. We need to do our own research instead of letting the entertainment industry tell us how to think. We need to check out history and realize that we are currently in the middle of an ebb in the usual ebb and flow of our economy and stop rushing for the panic button. We need to look across the aisle at our neighbor, no matter his convictions, and realize that without our fellow Americans we are not a nation. We really can kill our economy when we become so self-interested, so hate-driven for anyone different than ourselves, that we fail to see how we all prop each other up. We need to open our pocketbooks and put the word ‘trust’ back on those dollar bills.

We are like a giant machine with millions of tiny gears and cogs. Government, industry, labor….if any one of us tries to get too big, too important, too self-interested, we damage the balance of that machine. Enough of that and we really could reach a crisis. And a crisis in the biggest, most productive leading nation in the world is not just a crisis for us, but for everyone everywhere who relies on this giant machine, whether they know or acknowledge it or not.

So that’s my ‘why can’t we all just get along’ speech. I hope that I presented it with enough supporting facts to make it convincing. But if not, and you’re interested, feel free to write to me and ask – I’ll be happy to present the statistics in more detail and reference my sources. In conclusion, if I could offer everyone just one piece of advice right now, I’d say turn off your TV sets. Go outside and reach across the fence and meet your neighbor. Realize that the person you are looking at, whoever he or she is, holds just as important a place in the machinery as you do. Then maybe we can all start working together toward the common good and eliminate the words ‘special interest’, 'divisive', and most importantly, 'fear' from our vocabularies.