Digby flags a post over at Daily Kos written by Devilstower. It’s about the decade that just ended, why everybody wants to keep their eyes averted from the rear view mirror, and why we shouldn’t. Digby quotes a passage toward the end of the piece; I will quote the section that comes just before that (emphasis is in original):
Now that the decade we still don’t know how to name is in rear view (even if the “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Seem” label is still very visible), there’s been something of a movement to forget the last ten years. There are web sites, pundits, and television shows pushing the idea that we should just put the decade of zeros out of our minds, write it off as a lost period, and move on.
Of course, many people remember nothing about the naughts but moments of unmatched horror. To understand why, here’s a simple experiment (animal lovers turn away now) involving rats and a tank of water. Rats can swim, but that doesn’t mean they like it and a rat in the water is generally a rat in panic. Scientists tossed rats into a small tank of water in which a block of clear plastic had been suspended. Everywhere else in the tank it was so deep that the rat had to keep on paddling, but if the rat reached the plastic block it could climb up, rest, and shiver in relief. The scientists let the rats catch their breath, took them out… then tossed them back in again. It may seem cruel, but there’s a point to it. On repeat visits into the tub, rats remembered where the plastic platform was and scrambled over to it much more quickly. But here’s the kicker: rats given a compound that blocked the action of adrenalin on their first visit had a much harder time locating the platform on their return trips. In other words, they remembered better when they were terrified.
The same rules apply to us. If you think you remember the worst days more clearly, it’s because you do. There’s a good reason for this. For a primate making it’s living back in the savanna, every moment of every day wasn’t worth recording in the big book of memories. But the time you went down to the water hole and a leopard nearly jumped you? That one gets a page all it’s own — one with flashy stickers and a bright red border.
As tempting as it is to forget the bad times, the reason there’s a whole friggin’ biological system built around the idea of burning these events irrevocably into your cerebellum in 18pt type is so you don’t do it again.
Unfortunately, our political system encourages polarization, which is the opposite of what we need to solve our problems. Ezra Klein points to California as a vivid example of how that works:
California’s fiscal crisis will look sadly familiar to close watchers of the national checkbook. That’s because California is not having a fiscal crisis so much as a political crisis. The trigger may have been the recession, but the root cause was written into the state constitution, and it was visible long before the housing boom went bust.
In California, passing a budget or raising taxes requires a two-thirds majority in both the state’s Assembly and its Senate. That need not pose a problem, at least in theory. The state has labored under that restriction for a long time, and handled it with fair grace. But as the historian Louis Warren argues, the vicious political polarization that’s emerged in modern times has made compromise more difficult.
All of this, however, has been visible for a long time. Polarization isn’t a new story, nor were California’s budget problems and constitutional handicap. Yet the state let its political dysfunctions go unaddressed. Most assumed that the legislature’s bickering would be cast aside in the face of an emergency. But the intransigence of California’s legislators has not softened despite the spiraling unemployment, massive deficits and absence of buoyant growth on the horizon. Quite the opposite, in fact. The minority party spied opportunity in fiscal collapse. If the majority failed to govern the state, then the voters would turn on them, or so the theory went.
That raises a troubling question: What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?
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