Debt Ceiling Raised; The Adapting Society

The national debt ceiling was raised yesterday, with the politicians now preparing themselves for more important things: namely, their own vacations! And I will be embarking in a few days on mine as well. But unlike many of my compatriots, I have not been spending the last few days agonizing over whether we will fall into economic calamity or how terrible the terms of any deal would be to appease the extremists in the Republican Party (who seem to think, apparently with some justification now, that they hold the reins of power in our country). Truth be told, we all have to deal with the parameters, boundaries, and rules of things as they exist in the present. Sometimes economic conditions are expansive and broadening in nature, and sometimes, like now (unless you are rich), they shrink and narrow. And as a species, you can't beat the ability of humans to adapt. Sometimes this is good during periods of adversity. Sometimes, though, with prosperity the reverse is true.

I have noticed, as our society has become so much more fast-paced with the Internet and cellphone technology and the accompanying social networking and texting, people have become less and less patient. They expect, it seems, instant gratification on just about every level. And with this impatience has come an incredible shortening of the average attention span. Along with, it seems, a loss of historical memory. Which maybe goes to explain why a state like Florida can vote for a liberal Democrat as president and two years later vote in extreme conservative teabaggers for senator and governor. Or how nobody seems to remember that it was a Democratic president who last (repeatedly) balanced the federal budget while his Republican successor, with the repeated blessings of the GOP in Congress, sent the deficit spiraling out of control.

So maybe as the government scales back on its programs and spending, there will be a lot of initial shock and pain. But as I said, people tend to adapt to whatever is out there, and this may be an instance of that. The downside is that when you are always adapting to new things going on around you, for better or for worse, that means that you are in a state of passive reaction instead of actively engaging in the process of creating better foundational conditions. But I think that those in the latter category are relatively few in number compared to our predominant "adapting society", with its concomitant lack of attention span and memory.