“Lower your expectations” is more than the demand from the Washington Post to cope with Biden’s disastrous economic policies, it is the theme of the entire Biden presidency.
After a lifetime of begin taught to expect more, to be more, it is very difficult for me to accept that a return to the Carter years of stagflation and malaise is the “new normal”. The level of nihilism required to accept such a perspective is beyond my capability to understand.
I was truly offended (not in the trendy, superficial sense of today), by the arrogance of the perspectives of Ron Klain and Peppermint Patty that this is just a “high class problem” and it is about our new treadmills being a little late. Lowered expectations are much more of a problem for people who aren’t “high class” and get their exercise at the business end of a shovel, hammer, or trowel rather than on a treadmill.
Growing up poor, I was in the latter class. “Lowered expectations” was far less a theoretical concept and more of a reality for me. It didn’t mean that I didn’t aspire to better things, that I didn’t expect more, it was just the way we lived.
When I considered how we got here so quickly, I thought about a guy in our town most people referred to as the “Tinkerer”.
The Tinkerer was the guy in our community who collected all manner of broken things from bygone eras with the full intent of “fixing” them and returning them to service. We would probably call him a “hoarder” these days, but then he was just a local curiosity known more for his possession of arcane, ancient, and out-of-production stuff. If you needed something that a manufacturer no longer supplied or a part that never breaks but is broken, he probably had it somewhere.
While his main goal was fixing things, he rarely ever did. He just didn’t have the skill or knowledge to do so. He spent his resources collecting rather than doing – or learning how to fix anything. Any time he did return anything to service, it was almost always an accident of fate.
Such are the Democrats when they claim to be able to “manage” or “fix” the economy. Never mind those economies defy management by any planner, they collect discarded and broken ideas from bygone eras in the hope that someday, at some future time, something in there will combine into something that functions. They spend their time and your money in collecting debris and detritus of the past with no idea what to do with them.
Like the Tinkerer, Democrat expertise is entirely self-endowed.
“Lowering expectations” is just a tacit admission that the problem solvers are tinkerers. Their plan is just to ignore the issue, whether it is supply chain, illegal immigration, foreign threats, or social unrest, and hope it goes away – and if it does, to take credit for “fixing” things. That is just what we have come to expect for the living, breathing examples of Dunning-Kruger we tend to elect to office these days.
Rather than expecting them to deal with the problems, most of which are self-inflicted and could be remedied by just stopping doing what they are doing, they just ask you to suck it up and embrace the suck. Those of us who have lived in periods of true lowered expectations know three things:
To be told to accept a period of lower expectations is an admission of failure
Lowered expectations are temporary in a nation that was built on great expectations
The only way to overcome lowered expectations is to expect more and work toward them.
“Lowered expectations” is not the American way. We may accept our current conditions but only until we work our way out of them. We never accept them as a permanent condition or as the answer to any problem.
I’m reminded of an English idiom from the 19th and early 20th century: “Lie back and think of England”. The phrase refers to alleged advice for wives of that era that counted unwanted sexual activity as the price of the security of marriage.
The Biden people are telling our citizens to lie back.