Don’t Listen to the Naysayers in Our Midst

The News & Advance
Published: July 21, 2008

These are tough times for America and its citizens, no doubt about it.

The economy is sputtering and likely is in recession, brought about by the collapse of the housing bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis. People who had bought real estate with the expectation that its value would constantly rise are finding out otherwise, and many of them are winding up in foreclosure. Businesses, trying to cope with less revenue flowing in, are shedding jobs like an itchy dog scratching off pesky fleas. The financial markets are technically in bear-market territory. The federal government (read that as “the U.S. taxpayer”) has moved to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-private backers of more than half the mortgages in the country. And the Federal Reserve is predicting that the next 18 months will see a higher-than-normal number of banking failures.

Oil, the lifeblood of the modern world, is rising in price through the stratosphere. Gasoline prices are at record levels, not just in the United States, but across the world. Entire economic sectors are struggling to cope with a rapidly changing landscape; as a case in point, check the automakers as they are rushing to retool their offerings for a market of $4 a gallon gasoline.

The nation has troops on the ground, fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one entered into to take down the regime that harbored the planners of the Sept. 11 attacks and the other (however poorly planned) entered into to bring democracy to a freedom-starved corner of the world.

It’s a scary and unnerving time. And some people out there are loving it.

They’re the people who desperately want to stand out from the crowd, getting attention by claiming the sky is falling, the country is unraveling at the seams, the nation is disintegrating, the world is coming to an end, … .

You get the picture.

And you know the type: always contrarian, never a positive thing to say about anything, always unhappy with every little bit of non-negative news, always gloomy if even of a spot of blue sky is showing. You see them everywhere: the corner convenience market, the neighborhood restaurant, the house next door. And you can’t help but feel sorry for them.

They were around, in one shape or another, in the dark days of 1968, following the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., when the anti-Vietnam War protests rocked the country and when the Ku Klux Klan and its racist supporters tried to lynch black Americans “back into their place.”

The same folks stuck around throughout the 1970s, in the dark days of Watergate, the Arab oil embargo and the “malaise” of the Carter administration.

History — or at least American history — was coming to end, they chortled. One famous book of the early 1980s actually built its premise on what the geopolitical map of North America would look after the fall of the United States.

What sad, demented, troubled souls they are.

When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, the economy was in a slump and headed even lower. The national mood was sour, to say the least. The cost of living was high, wages were low and people were mad and scared at the same time. America was challenged on every front, domestically and internationally.

Whether or not you agreed with his politics, no one disputes that Reagan’s naturally ebullient mood was what the country needed.

Whoever enters the White House next January — John McCain or Barack Obama — is going to have a Herculean job ahead of him. And the hardest part won’t be fixing the economy, stabilizing and exiting Iraq or winning the war on terror.

It will be elevating the national mood. And it won’t be made easier by the Chicken Littles among us.