A ray of hope

Addicts of various stripe are usually in denial, which makes it impossible for them to dig out. If you refuse to recognize the problem and take responsibility, you won’t address it.

It usually takes some catastrophic event for one to face the music. They have to hit the wall. It isn’t all bad if it results in a turnaround.

I belong to a small club that meets monthly for dinner, as it has for almost a century. We take turns presenting papers on controversial subjects and then debate them. The deliberations are invariably spirited, but intelligent and not without wit.

It was my turn to present the paper. The theme I chose was that the “loan meltdown” was a symptom of a larger issue, not the problem. That problem is the “entitlement meltdown.”

During my formative years, I learned that you didn’t get accepted to college unless you qualified. You didn’t get a loan unless you could demonstrate the ability to pay it off. You weren’t hired unless you had the credentials.

Somewhere along the way, we veered off the road. We graduated some kids from high school who were barely literate and compelled colleges to accept them and green-light them through. Then, we forced businesses and colleges to hire them. We pressured banks to lend money to those who had little prospect of carrying the debt load. We allowed prodigious illegal immigration and diverted tax-financed services calculated to serve the citizens to be sopped up by illegals who were not contributing to the tax base. If you objected to any of this insanity, you were labeled and blacklisted. Political correctness usually damns those who describe things as they are. Euphemizers are free to spin things away from reality with indemnification.

When you mandate the employment of the unqualified into business and government positions, what outcome did you expect, other than billions in squandered salary dollars and even more in the cost of mismanagement? When you legislate lending to the financially weak, what did you foresee, other than defaults and losses? When you condition people to expect a free ride at someone else’s expense, what level of effort and responsibility did you expect? When you made it more lucrative not to work did you expect people to look for jobs?

It is in everyone’s interest to promote the general welfare. But, you do that by helping people attain literacy, productivity, responsibility and self-respect, not by lowering the bar.

Joe Paterno is the long-time and highly successful football coach of Penn State University. He’s also a champion of minorities. Yet, he strenuously objected to the overturning of Proposition 16.

That was the standard that required a meager 2.0 high school average and paltry 820 SAT score for a high school athlete to move up to the college level. Coach Paterno said that you were doing the kids harm by lowering the standard, not helping them. Meeting a standard to be admitted into college gave them motivation to achieve in high school and acquire an education. Lowering the bar took it away. And, to say that one or more ethnic groups were less capable of attaining a standard was de facto racism.

Coach Paterno maintained his standards and the minority composition of his team still increased. He maintains one of the highest percentages of graduation and average IQ among major teams. Point made.

The majority of the group I presented the paper to is liberal, so I expected my position to be lambasted. It wasn’t. They’ve now experienced the pain that makes you rethink your position. They’ve finally hit the wall. Hopefully, many have and we’ll begin to turn the corner without much further damage.

That’s not all bad.