Anyone who has raised anyone, anyone who has trained anything knows that, you can talk ’til you’re blue in the face, it’s the follow-through that counts. All else is pissing at the moon trying to make it more yellow.
As a totally random example, let’s say a kid doesn’t keep up with his classwork all term…a cocky and ungrateful child of Privilege who is accustomed to all good coming to him irrespective of his attitude or performance. The Entitled Teen’s customary remedy of cramming the night before an exam conflicts with a home game of Super Stars, loyalty to whom the Aristocratic Family of Four displays by purchase of season tickets that are more expensive than some people’s homes. On the floor, the fifty-yard line, behind home plate, other box-type seats in cool venues. High flyers. The Good Life.
Blah, blah, blah goes the speech about effective use of time. Yada yada yada goes the speech about personal responsibility. Blah, blah, blah goes the speech about the importance of education. Yada yada yada goes the speech about The Future.
Here is what matters. Here is what determines whether and how the study habits change. Do you leave the kid behind…perhaps inviting another to take his place since wasting his, alas, empty seat serves no purpose…or do you deliver those speeches all the way to the stadium, arena, field or other box-type seats in whatever cool venue?
That is what registers with the psyche…the rest is just a moving mouth.
All of our lip service to fair play, to honesty, to reliability, to responsibility, to conscientiousness, to free market enterprise, to prudence, to karma, to ethics, to Justice…out the friggin’ window with this bailout.
And what a misnomer that is, eh? The idea that the boat has merely taken on a bit of lake is comforting. I envision a flannel-shirted fisherman scooping the occasional pail of water out of the bottom of a trusty boat that has only sprung a slow leak…the aqua-equivalent of regularly adding a bit of air to the left rear tire. Annoying but not alarming.
Changing the name from Bailout to Rescue Package more accurately reflects the severity but it also, I contend, attempts to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Rescue=good. Unambiguously, straightforwardly good. Not so, the bailout. A dicey proposition cannot be reworded into goodness. Well, I mean it CAN be done, it is done all the time. Bad is continually packaged and presented as good…a practice that is facilitated, I expect, by our curious small=tall elasticity. I’m saying it doesn’t fly, rewording a dicey proposition into goodness. It doesn’t make it so.
Already we can see as additional billions of Rescue Dollars-not-to-be-confused-with-Monopoly-Money are sought and authorized, sought and authorized, sought and authorized, it is not the minor mop up implied by bailout, nor the unqualified good implied by rescue. Euphemisms R Us.
This is the volume and force of a gusher, freshly tapped by wildcatters poaching on someone else’s land. We are well-advised, I think, to seek Containment before Stimulus. Otherwise, it’s turbo-charged Appeasement.