The Impatience Crisis
Terry H. Schwadron
May 15, 2021
Here’s what impatience buys us:
Within two days of government confirmation of a hack on the Colonial Pipeline, temporarily halting oil and gas delivery to the Southeast and East Coast, we have a thousand gas stations running out of fuel and four states demanding an immediate emergency.
As it happens, there is plenty of oil in storage tanks that hasn’t gotten to those destinations, and within a week, the company has started its operations again. As an aside, a normal gas fill-up in New York state yesterday was just that,
But the impatience of Americans insistent on immediate solutions, politicians taking no time at all to declare a “crisis” exists, the evident greed of people to hoard supplies of their own, whether toilet paper a year ago or fuel this week, is the true emergency.
Impatience for resolutions by a government that we otherwise are choosing to blame relentlessly — whether it be the government of Donald Trump or Joe Biden or others — is the mark of our time. Whether the issue is a monthly snapshot of jobs that disappoints overly rosy predictions (which we should not be making in the first place) or international conflicts or complicated policies governing climate or health care or community policing, our real pandemic is institutional impatience.
The imposition of impatience on the issues of the day are skewing our ability to look at almost any issue to determine what is needed to understand the problem and come up with an answer. So, the re-start of border crossings is a “crisis” within days because it takes more than a day or two to set up facilities required to replace those torn down by the previous administration, and a temporary, if instant rise in consumer prices is depicted as longtime, institutionalized crisis inflation. Rep. Liz Cheney is saying unpopular things? Throw her out in 15 minutes of secret vote.
What’s behind the impatience? Advancement of a particular political point, of course, and personal greed.
Enforced Patience
Here is what enforced patience was delivering to Americans in the last week or so.
Now literally years after Donald Trump refused to make former White House lawyer Don McGahn available to testify to Congress about Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice regarding special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, McGahn is going to talk in private oversight hearings. Apparently, you just need to have unending patience for Law & Order to take effect for some people while impatience is sufficient to allow street cops the legal justifications for shooting before asking questions when others are involved.
Plus, it turns out there are other documents that should have been made available during those Russia probes that finally now need to be turned over in court. And, after patient waiting, other aspects of Donald Trump’s various brushes with the law, and those of people in his posse, including Rudy Giuliani, are nearing their court appearances.
Patience has brought us vaccinations for coronavirus to over half of all Americans with the possibility of reaching 70 percent in the next month, even with the resistance of many, dominated by Republican rural voters, to skip the process altogether. Patient pursuit of vaccine delivery is making America virus resistant and ready to return to full public life again while the rest of the world still suffers.
The very essence of patient consideration of alternative energies, transit systems, housing possibilities and emissions controls is what is demanded by a changing climate. The impatient criticisms arising in our country focus on the immediate impact rather than on the longer-term payoffs for immediate investment. It is an argument much easier to understand if you look at it from a point of view about patience rather than some political principle about the correct (and only allowable) view of the role of government.
The same is true about readiness for disasters, natural and manmade, for the developments in science and manufacturing that will make our lives easier, about the role and effects coming from automation and robotics.
Patience isn’t the only answer. But like most else of worth in our lives, it is a tool that can help us sift through what is critical and what can wait.
Institutionalized Impatience
We have institutionalized the patience problem, and haul it out of the closet when we find it useful.
When workers want a raise in the minimum wage, Republicans suggest patience for the eventual trickle-down of corporate profits from a system that gives a pass to companies who pay nothing in taxes. That’s something built-in.
When people of color complain that the system is racist, a right-leaning country and many states seem to be saying not only that the idea is wrong, but that there is an impatience here about trying to get current day Americans to redress centuries-old slavery complaints. Things are better than they were, and individuals can overcome any social slights, goes the argument. Just be patient.
When Joe Biden wants to let children who are dropped across the border remain in our care, Biden is being unduly impatient — and is, in fact, responsible for worsening the numbers of undocumented immigrants in our midst, charges the Right. The more correct answer, they say, is a Wall to stop crossings, and provide patience by ignoring growing poverty and violence just beyond our border.
But when too many people vote against Donald Trump for reelection, it must be fraud, and it must be stopped immediately. This calls for impatience in the name of election integrity.
I’m impatient here for Reason and Truth-Telling to reemerge.
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