Winston Churchill once said, and I believe it was Rahm Emanuel who famously repeated, that one should never let a good crisis go to waste.
As awful as it sounds, there is a kernel of truth in the idea that in politics (and probably almost every other facet of life), nothing big gets done in most cases unless people have the fear of God put into them.
Inertia rules the physical world, and while human beings have agency that rolling balls and ballistic rockets do not, experience shows that most people and organizations tend to do the same things over and over until they clearly don’t work, and then continue doing those things until there is no alternative.
What can’t go on forever won’t. But it will go on far past the point where you would think that a sane person would change direction.
“This whole impulse that we now have to urgently fix our problems…
