The Era of Low Expectations

Remember when the Space Shuttle would go up and come down - and it WASN'T news? Twenty years ago, you could go up to someone on the street and ask them if the Space Shuttle was in orbit, and the answer would be, "Um, I don't know, probably?" Now, every time we launch it's another Apollo 13, a major event complete with a few days of tension and the potential for emergency. I half-expect to flip on CNN while they langour over the successes of other 80s-era technologies... "OK, here in the break room, Anderson Cooper is going to microwave a burrito... we hope to God this works."

The point is that, not just with the Space Shuttle but in all respects, America has become the 5 year-old perpetually showing their crayon drawing to their teacher.



"I made a doggie!"

We demand praise and credit for that which should be human nature. We turn the averting of catastrophe into great victory. We cannot bother to ask anything more out of our citizens than the bare minimum in taxes and maybe a "support the troops" ribbon.

This is the decade of low expectations. And we're taking our cues from the head of state.

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In a way, George Bush wrote the book on low expectations. In a classic case of projection, he decried this practice throughout the 2000 election as a call to reform our education system:

Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less – the soft bigotry of low expectations. Some say that schools can’t be expected to teach, because there are too many broken families, too many immigrants, too much diversity. I say that pigment and poverty need not determine performance. That myth is disproved by good schools every day. Excuse-making must end before learning can begin.

This is the familiar strawman argument we've seen out of Bush for 6 years ("Some people say puppies are coming to Earth to kill us and steal our children. To them I say, the TAX CUTS ARE WORKING"). But with the benefit of hindsight, we know that he was also talking about the standards to which he would hold himself, his Administration, and the citizens he serves.

We knew it after 9/11, when the response to a terrorist act, when the nation and the world were literally ready to do anything to help out, was to resume shopping. How dare you not expect more out of this great wellspring of talent and determination we have in America.

We knew it when the Vice President announced that energy conservation was "a personal virtue," essentially waving a white flag of surrender to the current cycle of funding both sides of the war on terror, one with taxes and the other with gasoline. We can't expect innovation from America, the ability to become energy independent or even to make a couple less trips to the Kwik-E-Mart every day.

We knew it when we were asked to cheer that the budget deficit was down to an infinitesimal $300 billion dollars, because it wasn't $450 billion. Never mind the fact that it was a surplus before this crew got into power, or that we've raised the national debt ceiling to nine trillion, a $30,000 birth tax on every man, woman and child in the country.

We knew it when we were told to turn in all our civil liberties, but be happy and secure in the knowledge that we were still alive, and that there are no civil liberties when you're dead. We must be satisfied with either liberty or security, not both.

We knew it when we see the actions of the White House, who consider it a boost when nobody in their office gets indicted.

We knew it when we turned on the news and we saw all-out civil war in Iraq described as "potentially a good thing."

We knew it when we were told the good news that the country is committed to not torturing prisoners anymore, as if that should make up for the humiliations and predations suffered daily at Guantanamo and in prisons we don't even know about worldwide. That a President has to get on television and say "we do not torture," that pundits have to justify it by saying "at least we're better than Saddam," makes plain that these people have nothing but low expectations for us and our country.

We know it in a thousand tiny things that we see every day. We don't assume that we have a monopoly on scientific advancement and technological achievement. We don't believe that we can pull off the big idea anymore. We don't demand anything of our citizenry except that some of them vote and the rest of them hit the mall to serve as engines propping up the global economy. We don't expect any domestic problem to be solved at the hands of government. And we don't expect any world problem to be solved without the use of bunker buster bombs and heavy artillery.

We have the lowest expectations from government, for civic duty, for our national character, than at any time in the history of the Republic.

At least some of us do.

The liberal blogosphere is a perfect example of the untapped potential of the American spirit. The settling for low expectations out of our population is nothing but a deliberate failure of imagination. When we despair, when we give up, when we start to believe the learned helplessness that the more nefarious elements in society try to ingraine into us, that is when Republicans win. As practiced today Republicanism makes a mockery of self-reliance. They want you to believe that nothing is possible. They want you to believe that war is the only answer to foreign policy, that private enterprise is the only answer to health care and education and Social Security, that tax cuts are the only answer to fiscal policy.

They want you to know that you can't change the world.

But you can.

We not only should want to act, but we ought to be obligated to act in defense of our cherished values and principles. Democracy is as fragile as it is glorious. Whenever we take our eyes off of democracy, it can metastasize, dissolve, vanish. We cannot be silent in such times. The country DEMANDS that we set a higher bar for ourselves, that we do whatever it takes to make sure our national character remains sacrosanct.

We cannot live with these low expectations. Not one day longer. We cannot live in a country where it's OK that 43 million of our citizens are without health insurance, where it's OK that 18% of all children under the age of 18 live in poverty, where a man making the minimum wage couldn't afford to rent a studio apartment in most major cities. That can't be OK with us.

We cannot live in a country where we continue to burn more and more fossil fuels every year, with CAFE standards below that of China. We cannot stand idly by as our leaders bicker about accepted science, especially when application of that science could save milions of lives. We cannot allow there to be a choice between environmental health and economic growth. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

We cannot live in a country which believes diplomacy is empty and meaningless.

We cannot live in a country, to take this full circle, that sets expectations for students and doesn't live up to funding them.

And on and on and on.

We must demand more of ourselves if we want to live up to our ideals. We cannot be content with "you can't help everyone" and "my only worry is me." And it starts with each and every one of us. Get out there and do more than you think you're able to accomplish. Democracy requires participation. Without it we become too soft and too unable to respond to democracy's threats.

If you're reading this, you are likely to already know most of what I'm saying. But complacency is a hard habit to break. Let's not buy into these low expectations that those who want nothing but power have for us. We're stronger than them. We're smarter than them. And we shouldn't wait for those we consider our allies to do it for us, either. After all, it's OUR democracy.