When Good Things Have Bad Effects

It has often been said that you should be careful of what you wish for because often there will be very unexpected consequences. Looking at the current situation of international politics I have been thinking of this a lot lately.

To offer a more local example, I live near the community of Lodi, California. For many years Lodi was known by police across the country as being one of the safest places to live, virtually crime free. While the local police did a good job that was not the main reason for the lack of crime.

The safety of Lodi was due to the fact that it was where the leaders of the west coast branch of organized crime sent their families to live.  

As you might imagine once this became well known few criminals wanted to operate in the area. The chance that the little old lady you mugged might be the grandmother of a mob boss tended to convince you to avoid being within 20 miles of the community. At the same time the mob considered Lodi neutral ground and did nothing to harm anyone there.

Then the law did just what it was supposed to do, it brought down the mob and sent many of the leaders to prison. As a result the protection that Lodi had was no longer in place. Now I am obviously glad that they got rid of the mob but the fact is that it had unintended consequences.

Although on a different level, the same thing happened to crime in a lot of areas of the country. I am no fan of crime but at least the mob did keep it ‘organized’. Activities were restricted to certain parts of town and things like drug dealing were generally frowned upon.

Today the gangs run the crime world and it is pretty much anything goes. Obviously I’d love to have a world without crime, but since that is unlikely, I sometimes find myself nostalgic for the ‘good old days’.

The point of the story is that the same thing has been happening in the international community and in some ways we may be similarly nostalgic for something we never really liked.

Growing up as a child of the 1980’s I shared something with my parents and my grandparents, the fear of the Soviet Union. They were the bad guys and we worried about what they might do. It wasn’t just something from a James Bond movie, there was a real concern about them. Living in a primary target city I knew that if the worse thing came to pass then I was doomed.

But at the same time there was a certain level of security. While there were still terrorists out there they were frequently kept in check by the US and the USSR. In short we had ‘our bad guys’ and ‘their bad guys’ and neither side let them go too far.

Even the fear of war was more of a theory than anything else. Deep down we knew it could happen but wa also knew that both sides were reasonably rational. As Dr. Falken pointed out in the classic 80’s film War Games ‘It just doesn’t make sense’.

Today we no longer have to fear the Soviets but we do have to worry about dozens of other threats, often from people who are far less rational than the most unstable Soviet or American leader from the Cold War.

It kind of makes you wonder what will happen if we manage to win the war on terror.