It is a truism of all of our lives that it is far more difficult and time consuming to create than it is to destroy. A tower of children’s blocks takes a few seconds of careful placement to arrange but takes only a fraction of a second and a clumsy swipe to knock over. Hours of work repairing or constructing an automobile or a computer can be negated by a moment’s carelessness. A tree that takes years to grow can be cut down in a matter of minutes. Buildings erected and reconstructed with detailed plans and meticulous labor can be blown up through the messy application of enough force. Oil deposits that took millions of years to accumulate can be used completely in only a couple of centuries. Destruction is fundamentally easier and quicker than creation.
It is with that grim constant in mind that I read the following two stories in Thursday’s New York Times:
Intelligence Improperly Collected on U.S. Citizens
That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy
The first is yet another reminder that the bad old days of Nixonian surveillance are back again. Telephone conversations, e-mail messages, anonymous tips, anything is enough to have unelected bureaucrats begin sniffing through your life. The Fourth Amendment lies protected in the National Archives yet seems to have little jurisdiction outside of the display case.
The second is about the unbelievably shoddy and haphazard nature of our water supply. Clean water laws are in many cases decades out of date and operate as though no new products or chemicals had been introduced since the seventies. Even worse, during the last eight years (the term “Bush Administration” is curiously absent though alluded to several times) the government agencies tasked with protecting our water were cast adrift, so to speak. This in essence forces millions of Americans to play a kind of Russian roulette. The odds are heavily in your favor that you will never suffer any kind of ill effects from your water. However, the bullets (in this case, things like bladder cancer) are no less lethal for being extremely unlikely to hit you.
These are just two examples (and both are just subsets of larger already well known issues), but they and the countless others like them point undeniably to one conclusion: this country is in bad shape. Far worse shape, in fact, than even relatively well informed people generally believe because the scope of the rot is literally inconceivable. Almost every aspect of our unbelievably diverse and highly specialized society is some kind of dire straits, from food to roads to science to education to economics to politics and back again. It’s too much for any one person, but we can say with some certainty that we’ve got problems.
None of these problems are insoluble. (The drinking water can be fixed, the overreach of the surveillance state can be rolled back, etcetera etcetera etcetera.) But neither are they quickly soluble, either because the rot is too great, the vested interests too powerful, or some combination of the two. It is going to take time to fix them, which means that a lot of people are going to suffer in very real ways in the meantime.
So let us be plain about why these types of sacrifices are necessary: Bush the Younger did tremendous damage to this country, its people and its politics. (The backlash against the “blame Bush” argument has already begun amongst the true believers on the right, but, like most of their crusades, it’s based on stubborn rhetoric and a strict ignorance of facts.) He, with a lot of help, dug us into a very deep hole, one from which we cannot escape quickly or easily. It’s going to take years.
