The Politics of Impatience

We live in a ready-made, on-demand, attention-dysfunctional, instant result society that has lost all sense of patience. We can get immediate entertainment satisfaction through our computers, satellite televisions, cell phones and other portable electronic devices. Consequently our time expectation between demand and result has shrunken out of proportion to what is reasonable with respect to real world problems and solutions.

How else can you explain the outrageously unfair demand for the Obama administration to cure our nation’s ills within one month of his taking office? The man had not even completed moving his clothes into the Lincoln bedroom when the talking heads on cable TV were raising instant gratification demands/expectations for a solution to two wars abroad, a banking system on the verge of collapse, record unemployment, bankrupt domestic auto companies, immigration, healthcare reform, and political malaise and gridlock in Washington. And this was only the beginning of the list.

We are to be reminded that none of these developed on or after January 20th, 2008, and some of them were inherited by Mr. Obama’s predecessor, who had 8 years to solve and create his own problems. Yet, here we are, demanding that Mr. Obama’s administration crack the Federal whip on the BP oil spill disaster, roll back the healthcare bill that passed after an entire year of strife, keep us safe from terrorists, reduce big government, crackdown on Mexicans crossing the border illegally, and oh yes, there are those two wars that he didn’t start.

We have become infant children collectively, who demand to be instantly satisfied when they cry. These problems are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. You can’t open a box that contains instant solutions, unlike some of the simpleton solutions that partisan hawkers and doctrinaires bleat on television and talk radio. Where have healthy debate, negotiation, reasoned compromise and effective teamwork gone? We have ceded those concepts to radio and television political entertainers who blabber on and on at great personal profit and have allowed their narrow viewpoints to influence our national political discourse. This process has rendered the constitutional process irrelevant, and now we see a rise of racist viewpoints take the national stage. And that is the true concern regarding where this is all headed.