Just Give Me the Outcome
Terry H. Schwadron
Aug. 22, 2022
We all deal with impatience, of course.
Too often, impatience is my household downfall as I try to keep current on needed tasks while I still remember them. The urgency of the specific task is less important to me than showing that I am paying attention to my surroundings.
But I’m seeing the same on our national scale. As with television dramas, we expect all public disagreements to be settled in under a half-hour, not beset by legal or procedural complexities or by attempts to insert personalities into a stew of public policy concerns.
Not only do we demand that attention be paid, but it must happen immediately — or else.
It is the Or Else for which we are seeing effects now, attacks and threats of violence against judges, FBI agents, abortion clinics and anti-abortion institutions, and a list of targets that goes on and on. When discord touches our overwrought and hyper-sensitive political sensibilities, we’re now seeing that common-sense guides to conduct are being thrown aside.
The continuing brouhaha over arrival of plainclothes FBI agents at Mar-a-Lago to recover boxes full of classified documents is merely another platform for a wanted fight over sensible decorum and patience.
We apparently find it difficult to wait even a week to settle the tussle over release of the underlying search documents with what the Justice Department and the court apparently see as needed redactions to mask the names and circumstances of the investigation.
At heart, we’re seeing that pursuing criminal charges against a former president is exploding in ways that are slipping out of control.
Whose Impatience?
Impatience is in the eye of the advocate.
If you want abortion bans, they can’t be legislated fast enough, even if legislators later come to realize that they didn’t think through the myriad “grey” cases of how all this is affecting treatments for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies or treatments for moms that look too much like abortion for hospitals to continue to offer the services.
If you need an abortion or one of the other banned treatments, of course, all the legal wrangling is trying your sense of impatience as you try to beat the clock.
If you think Donald Trump should be held accountable for his role in any of several legal arenas or even sent to jail, any delay is too much If you think that state or federal prosecutors are nuts to think Trump will ever go to jail — or be allowed to go to jail — you are just as impatient with legal proceedings and endless media speculation about legal situations tightening for Tea Trump.
The right-leaning media outlets all headlined as important news that Donald Trump may file a lawsuit to argue that the search warrant should not be considered legally valid as a right of Fourth Amendment concerns about privacy. My years of journalistic practice say wait a minute, and let’s see if there is a lawsuit filed, and then read it. Then we may have news.
It is not news that Trump or anyone is going to challenge something legally. Plus, we’ve seen enough Trump lawsuits to know that he forces lawyers into court without evidence to press for his claims.
The news sites should know better: Headlines like this are what supports the criticism of news as political propaganda.
Impatience in the news business is leading to misinterpretations and error, even if there is no intent to offer misinformation. This need to be first, even without the event or new fact reliably supported, is one of the things we need to fix to make news reporting more credible.
We heard that Allen Weisselberg, financial director for The Trump Organization, pleaded guilty 15 counts of fraudulent business practices in New York, likely making it difficult for that business to continue as it has thrived over the years. But we have spent days trying to understand exactly what the terms of his plea deal will mean about court-ordered obligations to testify in a trial against the corporation in October. Testifying about the operations of such a tightly run family corporation would seem to put Weisselberg in the position of having to answer whether Trump, for example, had signed off on the now-fraudulent documents and decisions that Weisselberg carried out.
Patience requires waiting until the trial and knocking off all the speculation.
Politics Equals Impatience
The talk of politics is always impatient.
One side is always right, and the other always wrong. Among the only things we agree on is that it all should be decided instantly.
We want to call the elections in November before it is November, as if the ability to predict somehow enhances our own standing as expert or underscores our correctness in adopting a side in our growing civil war.
We want prices to lower by the end of the week, after years of covid and international supply line tangling. We want kids in schools even if we haven’t addressed ventilation issues or we want China to fess up by yesterday about what it knows of the origins of covid. Just as we wanted to leave Afghanistan without chaos, we want climate to take care of itself or instant agreement on issues like abortion, race, immigration, tax fairness and education. We get tired of talk about opioids, so we ignore the issues; we don’t have patience for legal entanglements, we want to dump our regulations over environment or corporate responsibility.
Maybe the August heat should remind us just to wait a minute before lashing out, before acting without the sufficient backgrounding, without thinking through what taking an action means,
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