How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Economic Meltdown: The Titanic Analogy

In the darkest days of the Bush administration, not too long after our cowed media failed us in the run-up to the Iraq war, after countless “left-leaning” politicians and pundits supported the Iraq invasion, after a scared public inexplicably voted for four more years of Bush stupidity, after Abu Ghraib, and with Katrina coming up just over the horizon, I remember thinking the following: “It feels like the American steam ship is headed straight for a giant iceberg, and the funny thing is, a part of me believes it might be better—for the long run—to go ahead and hit that iceberg head-on rather than try to maneuver around it. That way, after hitting it and suffering the painful consequences, the spineless apes currently running the show (in both parties and in the media) will be thoroughly discredited, and we can more easily mend our wounds as best we can and then head in a new and improved direction. Missing the iceberg would mean the country would avoid disaster but would continue on its downward trajectory. We need a wake-up call, followed by big changes.”

Be careful what you wish for, right? Sure enough, the iceberg was there and America hit it going full-bore. And the consequences have been terrible for countless individuals, as well as for the country as a whole.

But when we finally come out of this mess, we may be thankful for the changes that this terrible shock will have engendered. We can no longer fool ourselves that we are making progress by simply re-arranging the deck chairs. Real changes must, and I believe, will be made.

The improved direction in which we may be headed can already be mapped out today, even though we are still in midst of the crisis, with much more pain to come. My next post will outline some of these changes on the horizon that can, at least in part, be attributed to the U.S.S. America hitting the economic crisis iceberg.