Darkness and Light

Two pieces that came out last weekend provide a cautionary tale and, to my mind, a bolt of light.

The cautionary tale is about Japan and how it has fallen in the last twenty years.  Martin Fackler at the NYT looks at not only the technical reasons for the fall - deflation being the biggest, evidently, although it's hard to tell if that's a symptom or a disease.  But more interestingly he writes about the failure of Japanese grit.

Japan’s loss of gumption is most visible among its young men, who are widely derided as “herbivores” for lacking their elders’ willingness to toil for endless hours at the office, or even to succeed in romance, which many here blame, only half jokingly, for their country’s shrinking birthrate. “The Japanese used to be called economic animals,” said Mitsuo Ohashi, former chief executive officer of the chemicals giant Showa Denko. “But somewhere along the way, Japan lost its animal spirits.”

The light, to me, is from a  piece in the weekend Journal by Jonathan Haidt that associates the Tea Party movement with karma.  It corresponds with everything I've seen about this middle class movement of people who are sick of our failure to accept consequences.  These are the folks who don't buy the idea that every kid on the team gets a medal and every team wins the league.  They are prepared to accept their own failures, but don't want to pay for everyone else's.  Losers should lose, gracefully, and winners should win, gracefully, so long as everyone plays fair.  

Putting the two together - optimist that I am - I am persuaded that we Americans can pull out of this slump because we have the stones.  We can suck it up, roll up the sleeves, and believe in the future.  But crappy handouts will not work, nor will get-out-of-jail-free cards, and unless our leadership stops offering them, it will be sayonara for the next decade.