A Nation in Denial
Denial: You’ve heard of that. The word first entered popular parlance when an epidemic of illegal drug use swept across the country and naïve families discovered addicts in their midst. Denial was used to describe the response typical to parents, siblings, and others who cared about the user but felt powerless in the face of this unfamiliar threat. Helplessly, they watched as use morphed into addiction and addiction became the central fact of their loved one’s life.
Denial allows us to hold two conflicting beliefs at once. Bewildered parents of a teen-age addict often recognized a problem existed, for instance, while at the same time harboring a sincere belief that there was no problem in another, more dominant space of their brains. This state of affairs often continued until some dire turn of events—arrest, expulsion from school or an overdose—broke through parents’ defenses.
Denial was once a personal affliction. Now, it has become a national characteristic. Denial kept financial and political “leaders” stuck in inaction until the current economic catastrophe struck. It has enabled us to minimize the harvest of death, grief, and devastation we have wrought in Iraq.
Consider: How long ago did our military minds celebrate the arrival of George Bush by boasting “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln? Let me remind you: May 1, 2003, more than five years ago. This is only the most glaring, dramatic example of leadership by denial: Denial that thousands of lives, American, Iraqi, and others, have been lost in a botched war of aggression (ours); denial that we went into Iraq on false pretenses, under cover of the claim the Iraqis were producing weapons of mass destruction—and, oh yes, that they were responsible for the 9/11 attacks; denial that this war is waged at huge financial cost to the American taxpayer. (We can still afford to give the wealthy their tax cuts, we’re told.) The scope of this scenario is astounding.
And now, after years of over-priced housing and unsustainable loans to unqualified buyers by irresponsible bankers, both borrowers and lenders (equally culpable in this fiasco, I believe) have gone so belly-up that the rest of us (read taxpayers) are asked to bail them out. The New York Times reported that top administration officials, “described the financial system as effectively bound in a knot that was being pulled tighter and tighter by the day.” AND THEY JUST NOW NOTICED?
And then there are the less global, though no less lamentable events. The summary of a news article showed up in my inbox recently. “There is anecdotal evidence that texting while doing something else is beginning to cause fatal accidents,” it said. Now there’s a news flash for ya’! In the wake of a train crash which snuffed out the lives of 25 Angelenos, the New York Times went on to report that “the California Public Utilities Commission announced an emergency measure . . . temporarily banning the use of all mobile devices by anyone at the controls of a moving train.” TEMPORARILY? . . .YOU MEAN UP TO NOW, IT’S BEEN LEGAL? Oh, my goodness.
The list goes on and on. We seem to believe we can provide world-class education without adequate funding, that health care issues will somehow work themselves out, that our own crumbling infrastructure can hang on while we wreak havoc abroad. All of these exemplify not only denial of the urgency of these issues, but also of the magical thinking engaged in by leaders who seem stuck in fantasyland.
It’s time to end the culture of denial and elect political leaders who have the maturity and wisdom to listen to points of view different from their own, consider options, anticipate possible outcomes, make rational and honorable decisions, speak honestly to the electorate, and begin to restore our national self-respect.
This may be our last chance to get it right.
Balance
Until recently, I was a “project person.” I liked to tackle an undertaking—no matter what it was—and stick with it through completion. Interruptions annoyed me. Necessity temporarily cured this affliction when infants entered my life, but later I returned to my single-minded ways.
Suddenly, however, I find it isn’t interruption that annoys me. It’s me. (Okay, you purists, it is I.)
I’ve been spending many hours at the computer—not idly surfing the net or playing games or chatting with on-line companions, mind you. No. I’m doing serious work (I tell myself): researching book marketing, posting blogs, analyzing other writers’ sites . . .and feeling as though I’ve stepped into an endless, time-gobbling, mind-hobbling black hole otherwise known as the Internet.
Though my annoyance confounded me at first, it’s turning out to be a good thing: It has forced me to seek balance. I didn’t realize how viscerally I needed that until a friend called the other day. When the phone rang, I was on the roof of the house, cleaning the rain gutter, long clogged with leaves and dirt. Thus preoccupied, I let the machine pick up and retrieved the message later.
“Hey,” she had said, “what’s up?”
I called her back and told her I was what was up—on the roof, that is. “Oh, you’re getting some real work done!” she exclaimed after hearing the details.
“Yes,” I replied. Real work. That was it. Work which produced results both visible and immediate. “It feels good to accomplish something I can see,” I went on. “I don’t get dirty enough any more. I’m spending way too much time at the computer.”
Sometimes you don’t know what you’re thinking until the words come out of your mouth. At that moment, I realized my life lacked balance. I had become stuck in my own vision of who I thought I was: that driven project person.
I’m not her (yes, I know, she) any more. Life changes. Time moves on. Goals soften or transform into something else altogether.
Balance. We all need it, and we all have to find the balance that works for us.
And now I’m off to clean the garage.
