You may remember way back in July '08, when former senator Phil Graham, serving as a major economic advisor to then-presidential candidate John McCain, referred to our national state as a "mental recession," and described his countrymen and women as "a nation of whiners."
He was right. Naturally, however, once we proved him right, his boss also felt obligated to agree that such was not the case. Graham then tried to tell us he was only talking about the people we hire to represent us. That would make us look better?
My point is not that it wasn't an incredibly naiive thing to say. I offer the view that it is these moments of stark realism that define our continued journey into the black hole of avoidance. The place we are in today as a nation is due precisely to the fact that we have spent several generations mouthing the words of personal responsibility while coddling ourselves and our children, calling it character-building for them and convincing ourselves that nothing that happens to us is our fault, our responsibility or our problem. And we're so far gone now that the only fix IS another crash followed by 10 or 12 years of starting all over again.
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