by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright September 2015
Here are some famous events that are examples of Panic Thinking and Blunder response.
The 9-11 Disaster is the most vivid example of Panic Thinking. It is the one that started me down this line of thought. America's response to 9-11 has been a textbook example of community Panic Thinking.
In 2001 America was attempting a "soft landing" in the wake of the Dot-Com Bust and the post-Enron Accounting scandals. There was economic stress and technological stress. Americans were also recovering from fear of the "Y2K" Non-Disaster. (The high emotions of impending Non-Disasters, by the way, are some of the fastest forgotten parts of human history, so this part of the emotional package of 9-11 is often forgotten about.)
As mentioned earlier, never before had America or the world witnessed many jet planes being flown into many skyscrapers by suicidal terrorists. By my reckoning, it will be the most famous disaster of the 21st century. We will still be memorializing the event in 2199.
We have all watched as Americans enthusiastically
o Trashed their legal protections
o Trashed their airline industry
o Started wars with two countries
o Spent billions on wars and seriously inconvenienced themselves in day-to-day life with various procedures and agencies designed to improve "Homeland Security"
Whew! This is a serious set of blunders. This was the Novel Threat of the Century, and it started America on the Blunder Chain of the Century.
There are places where America's Blunder added novel threats to communities. These created more Panic Thinking and Blunders.
o The Iraq War destabilized the Middle East. Ironically, it became more violence-friendly and terror-friendly than ever.
o The discarding of Rule of Law in favor of "these terrorists are a special case"-tactics weakened Rule of Law worldwide. This added to the threat, and scariness, of government-sponsored violence worldwide. It also disenfranchised communities, which added to violence and terrorism.
o The Iraq Situation of the 2010's was the result of a yearly Blunder Chain that started with too little thinking about post-Saddam Iraq back in 2002.
o The novelty of Homeland Security produced Blunders ranging from new security procedure gaffs to the 2007 Boston Bomb Scare overreactions discussed below.
The long-lasting scars from the post 9-11 Blunders are deep and numerous. They have affected America a lot, and the rest of the world a little less. Here are some examples:
o America's 9-11 response brought Terrorism to center stage in America's culture. It was not center stage before 9-11, and had America responded differently it would not have been in post-9-11 America, either. After 9-11 America could have treated Al-Qada as a crank terrorist cult that got a lucky hit, but instead America chose to treat it as a major symbol of evil, and likely to produce more damage of a similar scale. America also chose to treat Terrorism as a major evil to be battled with direct and righteous effort, instead of choosing to treat it as just another kind of criminal activity that should be combated as part of comprehensive anti-crime activities.
o The Abu Gahrib photos scarred America's image as a right-doing culture. It cost America a lot of high moral ground.
o Starting the War with Iraq scarred America's image of doing things with good cause. More high moral ground lost; America looked prone to doing stupid things.
o Not being able to make Iraq into a shining example of democracy in the Middle East in just a few years scarred America's reputation as an able problem solver. (America had succeeded doing this in the case of Germany, Italy and Japan after WWII.) Instead America looked stupid. Its government looks like a "stupid Imperial Storm trooper"-government rather than a "shining light of the Rule of Law and Democracy"-government. This was a huge loss.
o America beefed up a state-sponsored religion. (All must pray at the altar of the Holy Metal Detector, so the plane will fly better.) America looked insane and cowardly as well as stupid.
o Airline trashing altered America's transportation network. The airlines did not fill the transportation role that was projected for them in the days before 9-11. Instead it became a smaller role, and alternatives such as trucking, autos, private aviation, and the Internet prospered in its place.
All-in-all. 9-11 and the post 9-11 actions are textbook examples of unadulterated Community Panic Thinking and Blundering. The scars from 9-11 will still be with us when we are watching 9-11 Remembrance Videos in 2199.
Lets move on to the Civil War. Note that the Civil War gets its own chapter as a case study. This section looks at it through the Panic and Blunder prism.
The regional differences between the North and the South in America date back to colonial times. As the North became more industrialized and the South prospered on a cotton-growing boom those differences became sharper. This lead to big differences in desirable economic, social and legal policies between the North and the South. There had been dispute for decades before the Civil War, and many successful solutions to the disputes. The problem was not new, and solving the problem was not new.
The old Whig Party dissolved in the 1850's, and the power vacuum it left behind was filled suddenly and aggressively in the late 1850's by the newly founded Republican Party (founded 1854). The surge to power of the Republicans was a novel event in the politics of America, and The Southern leaders saw it as deeply threatening.
The threat was made even more scary by a world-wide bank panic in 1857. This series of bank failures was taking money out of everyone's pockets, North and South, and everyone was getting scared. The Republican platform of how to handle the economics -- things such as protective tarriffs -- were promising to take even more money out of Souther pocketbooks.
The Southern leaders responded to the Republican threat by declaring that they would secede from the Union if a Republican were elected president. That happened in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the Southern leaders made good on their threat.
Secession was something new to America, and so it was not responded to well, either. Lincoln and the Republicans saw it as a threat, and the Civil War as we know it ensued. That was far from the end of this Blunder Chain. Other elements include: The surprisingly long and damaging Civil War itself (1860-65), The Reconstruction Era (1860's through 1870's) and Jim Crow South which lasted into the 1920's.
o The strong federal government of the United States (compared to that of Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
o America's high concern with race relations.
o The "Solid South" always voting Democratic from the 1890's through the 1970's.
o The South being an economic laggard in the US until the 1960's.
o The economic, social and cultural perceptions of Northerners about Southerners, and vice versa.
This is a smaller scale example of Panic and Blunder. The scale is smaller, but the unnecessary expense is just as real.
Along with many other issues facing cities of the Northeast US in the 2000's, Boston city government was in the throes of dealing with a controversial public works project called "The Big Dig" (an automobile tunnel under downtown Boston). The Big Dig cost billions, and it was late and over-budget. In 2006 it became a high profile scandal because parts of the inner wall fell down, killing a person driving through it. The event was stressful enough to the city that it called in outside help to do damage control.
On the night of Sunday January 30th, 2007 two young marketers put up about twenty battery powered odd-looking plastic signs in high traffic areas of downtown Boston. It was part of a low-budget guerrilla marketing campaign for an upcoming movie based on a cable TV cartoon show.
In twelve other major US cities the signs were looked upon as a curiosity and no unusual action was taken. In Boston the first reaction of city officials was that these novel signs could be a terrorist bomb threat. Traffic was shut down in many high volume parts of the city for a half day as the signs were checked out by bomb squads.
o The city of Boston arrested the two men who were paid to put up the signs.
o The cartoon producer paid the City of Boston $2 million to cover emergency expenses.
o A VP of the cartoon company was fired.
o Boston gained a reputation is a city with a touchy, provincial-minded government that would hurt people who did strange things in their town. The people of Boston would now live with a lot less novelty in their lives, and a lot more paperwork. Anyone planning on doing something "strange" in Boston would now look for some government official to give them an OK. As is usual with such things, this would affect low-budget experimental projects much more than high-budget, low-risk projects.
o As of April 2007, the mayor of Boston was still standing solidly behind the blunder. In a press conference he urged the people of Boston to boycott the movie, which was scheduled to open in the Boston area that weekend. Other Boston officials were asked by the media about their feelings on the matter and they responded with, "No comment." This is an indication of how long lasting a blunder scar can be. As of April, the mayor was still a worried man.
o This became a warm up for the Boston Marathon Bombing panic and blunder in 2013. Sadly, Boston learned to overreact to these kinds of crisis. Overreaction became the sports thinking for the region.
In 1969 President Nixon started what he called The War on Drug Abuse. Well... it still hasn't passed the English-French Hundred Years War in length, but it is surely a long running US social Blunder.
In 1969 President Nixon was still trying to extricate America from the Vietnam War. Inflation from Johnson's, "We will have both guns and butter." fiscal policies was rising and worrisome. This was also the time when The Generation Gap was in full flower: The Baby Boomers were coming of voting age, and through choices in music, movies, and protesting, they were already demonstrating that they were going change America's social mores. It was a scary time for anyone older than 35. (And that was one of the slogans of the era, "Don't trust anyone over 35.")
Long haired males, Hippies and recreational drug use were some things that Baby Boomers were experimenting with. These were all things that upset older generations deeply.
The Nixon Administration decided that drug abuse was at the root of the Generation Gap-related social unrest the nation was experiencing. So, it was important to stop drug abuse.
Drug abuse as identified by the Nixon Administration was an entirely different perception of drug abuse than that held by Baby Boomers, so the laws and programs established were a really bad match with Boomer reality. The laws were seen as persecution by the Boomers, and this persecution resulted in a severe disenfranchisement of the Boomers. Older teenagers and young twenties people feel a lot of disenfranchisement in the best of times, so this attack by "The Narcs" just made matters worse.
The drug program is something of an oddity because it is a Blunder Chain that continues even though the novelty of the threat wore off long ago. The "drug program" did not solve the "drug problem", but it continues to be supported. Even stranger from an outsider perspective, now those originally persecuted, the Boomers, are those supporting the Blunder.
Most strange... most strange....
o The disenfranchisement of large parts of American society over drug issues has progressed into the 2010's. This disenfranchisement is the source of a lot of the violence America experiences in the 21st century. And the programs feed the disenfranchisement. One way is by putting so many people in prison.
o The role of police forces in America has changed to become much more violence oriented instead of community mediator oriented. This is a form of disenfranchisement.
o This disenfranchisement has spread to other countries that supply drugs to the US, such as Columbia. Columbia has become home to an essentially permanent countryside insurrection that is financed by the disenfranchisement that creates the illicit drug market. This insurrection is a textbook example of the result of chronic disenfranchisement.
o A program like the War on Drugs -- one that deals with lots of dollars of product demand and disenfranchises people for years and years -- becomes the spawning ground for lots and lots of corruption, violence, and arbitrary trampling of civil liberties by government officials. The corruption is a government credibility killer.
These are some historic examples of Panic Thinking and Blunders.