Unintended Consequences

Although he can be awfully obnoxious at times, Fox News big shot Bill O’Reilly does get one thing right: he devotes much of his time decrying something he calls “unintended consequences”. With him, of course, it’s usually related to his “culture wars” or politicians who don’t tow his line on a particular issue. But unintended consequences can have either positive or negative outcomes (or both). Here are some examples:

--Aviation pioneer Steve Fossett recently disappeared in his small plane somewhere in the northern mountainous Nevada wilderness. Because of this, a wide search has been underway to discover his fate and to possibly rescue him. Although at this writing, he hasn’t been found, eight other crashed planes have been found as a consequence of the search. And quite possibly one of the planes was flown by a man who disappeared in 1964, leaving a (then) four-year old son, who is now living in the Gainesville area.

--During the 1970s, the Nixon Administration tried to have former Beatle John Lennon deported from the U.S., but the efforts were futile and Lennon was able to stay in his adopted country. But in December 1980, he was assassinated in his favorite city, New York.

--When Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Waylon Jennings were on tour during the late 1950s, they once had an opportunity to travel on a small plane. But there wasn’t enough room for the three of them, so they flipped to see who had to stay behind. Waylon lost, and because of that, he survived the fate of his two friends when the plane later crashed.

--President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 under the banner of fighting terrorism, but the subsequent occupation has had the opposite effect, with militant and pro-terrorist movements such as Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah experiencing unprecedented popularity in sections of the Muslim world (partially in opposition to the US occupation of Muslim Iraq). And diverting resources into Iraq from Afghanistan, where we had been pursuing the Al-Qaeda leadership, has created the situation where the Taliban there is resurgent and Bin-Laden, complete with his newly-dyed beard, is sending out arrogant videos taunting us. He is a premeditated mass murderer, but one of our government officials recently dismissed him as “irrelevant”.

--During the 1970s, when the Space Shuttle was up for initial funding, there was a plan for a sturdy, highly protective outer casing to the Shuttle. Instead, in order to save money, a cheaper and highly inferior tile-system was funded. And now, after the Columbia disaster a few years ago, we all have to hold our breaths every time the Shuttle takes off or lands, just in case some dinky little piece of crud hits the ship and damages it to where it can’t withstand reentry.

--First, the Democrats in Florida, thinking they were so smart, voted to move their presidential primary ahead of the others. Then the national Party declared that the results of such a primary would not produce any voting delegates. Now, because of that, many Florida Democratic voters are thinking of boycotting the primary altogether. And because of that, they won’t vote on an important state-wide property tax referendum that is on the ballot on that same primary election day.

--Back in late 1990, Congress was debating whether or not to support President Bush’s (#41) proposed military action to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait. Senator Al Gore was one who was teetering with his vote. Finally, he voted with the President (and against most of his Party). Two years later, Gore was picked by Bill Clinton as a pro-defense running mate and was elected as his Vice-President. I believe that some of the ambitious Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton and John Edwards (who was still in the Senate), took this “lesson” and supported the authorization-of-force bill that was passed in late 2002. Only this time it backfired on them. And it may well have cost Edwards the nomination (and possibly the Presidency) in 2004.

--After the 2000 Presidential Election, Democratic lawyers descended on three South Florida counties (Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach) to try to manipulate the recounts to favor their candidate Al Gore (trying to count formerly rejected ballots in those counties, all three of which went for Gore) and tip the statewide balance in favor of him. Doing this, though, had the unintended consequence of delaying the more fair statewide recount and pushing litigation to the point where the US Supreme Court intervened (in my lay opinion, incorrectly) and handed the Election to Bush.

I ‘m not sure exactly what lessons can be learned from the previous examples, except that we only fool ourselves when we believe that we can manipulate and control our futures with our pet assumptions and strategies. Because, after all, “stuff” happens (to put it euphemistically), and there are too many variables in our world and lives for us to be as overconfident as we sometimes are about our destinies.