Rambling man

Graham has come in and is doing some building here in the garret / study / exercise room / playroom, so I can't quite work, so I might as well blog. Today I break old school.

In human endeavors there is always a need to balance reflection and circumspection with activity. Am I doing the right thing? Does this make sense? These are very normal questions to ask yourself. When you do it too much, you get trapped in "paralysis by analysis," as the consultants like to say. The question, then, is finding the right balance between doing things and thinking about doing them.

As with individuals, so with society. America began to show less healthy skepticism starting with Reagan (this would have been on the upslope from Carter's Malaise speech) and then really threw caution to the wind once the Berlin Wall came down. We were right, dammit, history had vindicated us. Fukuyama's "End of History" came out and said that the last ideological challenge was fundamentalist Islam, and he ended up righter about that then he wanted to be for a little while.

Over in Russia, the story didn't appear so simple. Gorbachev became a villain, and there was nostalgia for the Brezhnev and even the Stalin days.

But we were off to the races with market fundamentalism (to which I myself partially succumbed). Hell, who was gonna tell us we were wrong? The French? Our own scraggly Left?

The earth, admittedly, was sending signals with sun and meltage. And all you had to do was look at all those big boxes and massive SUVs which were products of rule-skirting and you could tell something was wrong, but it was too tiresome to fight it.

And now we don't have to.