Crisis can force change that wouldn’t occur otherwise

Published 12:33 am Monday, March 30, 2009

By Staff
The excessive Eighties are finally over here in the Uh-Ohs.
Our parents knew World War II and Depression.
I remember Vietnam, civil rights and the assassinations of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., so I know I was too young to really be part of the Sixties.
We baby boomers grew up not knowing scarcity, which gave us freedom to be idealistic. We favor a higher-minded American ideal of we're all in this together than every man for himself.
As a GOP elected official wondered at the Lincoln Day dinner March 28, if Abraham Lincoln was alive 200 years after his birth, would he be a Republican?
My old nemesis Nuke Gingrich waited two months before faulting President Barack Obama for "failing to turn around the economic decline" he showed little interest in during eight years of borrow-and-spend runaway Republican deficits, tax cuts for the superrich which never trickle down to ordinary Americans and blind-eye oversight of the financial sector.
That's the real class warfare, that only a few elites share in American prosperity, while everyone else is expected to be satisfied with crumbs from their banquet table while we exported jobs with living wages and turned the United States into a third-world country, judging from pictures of Detroit featured in at least two national magazines just for shock value.
Just 25 hedge-fund managers earned $11.6 billion in 2008.
The same experts who didn't see this mess coming.
Almost half of capitalism-loving House Republicans voted for a confiscatory 90-percent tax to punish Wall Street executives for their pay.
As Obama said on "60 Minutes," "If you had said to us a year ago that the least of my problems would be Iraq – which is still a pretty serious problem – I don't think anyone would have believed it."
It may not be easy living through a wrenching pivot point in history like the industrial revolution, but a global economic crisis – Spain's European Union-leading 14-percent unemployment is worse than Michigan's 12 percent – can force change that wouldn't occur otherwise.
As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, hosting the G-20 meeting in London, said, "Globalization has brought 4 billion people into the world economy, where 10 or 15 years ago there used to be only about a billion … without an effective form of supervision. We've got huge climate-change and energy problems that can only be addressed at a global level … (the Obama administration) is totally focused on these problems … The world that emerges out of this crisis won't be the same. The banking system will be based on sounder principles."
You remember Britain. Led the world until being overtaken by an upstart from the colonies.
As for the living-large '80s ending, this day has been coming my entire working life, which began as a $150-a-week reporter in Three Rivers, where even after waiting in line for gasoline we didn't do anything about our dependence on foreign oil.
Back then, gambling was confined to Nevada and New Jersey.
Now, Michigan is one of 12 states with casinos.
All but two states allow some form of legalized betting.
Ronald Reagan remade the political landscape with Morning in America, a simple image which tested better than the collateral damage from cutting taxes while raising defense spending, beginning a three-decade mindset for immediate gratification.
No wonder Las Vegas became such a monument to conspicuous consumption, just as the sexual revolution begat AIDs.
Gorging ourselves on cheap goods at Wal-Mart hid the reality that the U.S. economy grew more slowly than the world economy every year since the turn of the century.
We just kept barreling along in denial, coasting and beating on our chests reflexively that America is No. 1 without checking to see if we any longer walk the talk while consuming TV shows that glorify the ostentatious lifestyles of nouveau riche celebrities who are famous for being famous.
Maybe it seemed like 9/11 "changed everything," but things have been changing since I was in high school.
When I graduated in the mid-70s, Jimmy Carter was skulking around in a sweater to ward off the post-'60s malaise of recession, oil crisis and cultural decadence. Disco flourished.
Yet what happened next? Bill Gates and Microsoft. Steve Jobs and Apple. There will be something equally fantastic around the corner from new entrepreneurs unshackled by the wreckage to dream big in different ways with a clearer path ahead.
We still listen to recorded music and I think people will continue to crave journalism.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein filled journalism schools with Watergate.
Maybe Bernie Madoff and other Wall Street heels will send some of the best and brightest in another direction, such as the arts, public service or politics.