My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #10, September 14, 1998

NEVER JAM TOMORROW

Have you noticed how often these days people seem to be caught totally off-guard by problems that might reasonably have been predicted?

When people started wiring their home with burglar alarms that required them to key in codes every time they walked in the door, was what happened not absolutely predictable: that 95% of the time forgetful family members would be the ones who set the alarms off? And that valuable police time would be wasted responding to these non-burglaries?

There are few things in life that could have been more guaranteed to happen, and at a known time, than the start of the year 2000. The guys who were programming with two-digit dates to save space in the computer told their bosses this would cause trouble, but the bosses always figured it was too expensive to fix right now. So nobody really started trying to fix all those lines of code, or worried about those embedded dates in processors until about 1996 (and there are businesses and government agencies that still don't realize they might have a problem).

Our national motto is becoming PLAN AHEAd. In the last 25 years, we have had an epidemic of short-term thinking in this country, led by corporate executives who know they can keep their positions only as long as they make sure quarterly earnings are grossly excessive. Anything that interferes with those quarterly earnings--research and development, careful safety engineering, maintenance, decent salaries, employee training--is ruthlessly sliced.

Which is to say, the future itself is sliced. But executives who move freely from company to company don't need to care about the long-term health of any one company; they have concentrated their long-term thinking on their personal futures, negotiating wonderful pension plans and severance packages for when they leave the company or run it into the ground.

Short-term thinking is hardly limited to corporations. As one who works in an academic library, I know that for any university, the black holes in the budget are the computing center, the library, and maintenance. They always need more money for expensive things--computers, subscriptions, machines, concrete. People to give service at all hours are even more expensive. When times are tough, these are tempting targets for administrators who have to cut costs.

And yet these are the very things that make students want to come to a university--easy access to working computers 24 hours a day, seven days a week; people right at hand all the time to help them use them. Students want a pretty campus, clean, temperature-controlled buildings, and attractive landscaping. They want all their research material to be right there in the library, or better yet, available full text in expensive online databases, and they want librarians who will spend hours at a time working with them on their projects.

Restoring this after you've cut it is always more expensive than keeping it going in the first place--your choice is repairing the roof when it first starts leaking, or repairing it later and also repairing damaged floors, ceilings, and furnishings. Dropping journal subscriptions and then later filling in the holes left in the runs of those journals costs more than keeping the subscriptions going.

And yet universities have to cut costs someplace, because they now have to contend with other people's short term thinking. Confronted with students whose parents have saved less for their children's educations than any previous generation, they can't say, "Look, this is what it costs us to educate each student and provide these services, so this is what our tuition will be." Administrators now have to compete with other colleges by offering lower costs and higher financial aid.

We see the results of short-term thinking in our governments as well. During the birth drought of the 70's and 80's, a lot of school districts boarded up schools or sold them or converted them to other uses. Now that the baby boomers have begun to reproduce en masse, and we have more children in school than at any time in our history, our city leaders are asking, where did they come from? Where will we put them? Where will we get teachers? How will we pay for this?

But if you know that a sizable percentage of your population is in the prime childbearing age between 20 and 40, you have to expect babies. Any reasonable school superintendent or city planner should routinely be using census data to plan for future growth, for schools and recreation. There is no good excuse for being caught with your pants down.

Ah, yes. Speaking of that, we see the result of short-term thinking in our president's current predicament. Clinton has brought his presidency to the brink of ruin by his unwillingness a year ago to accept the short-term pain of saying, "Yeah, I did it. It's none of your business." By hoping the whole sorry mess would go away, he let embarrassment be compounded by perjury. Worse, by lying to his friends and advisors, he hung them out to dry, letting them defend a lie and incur huge legal bills on his behalf. If he remains in office, he will nonetheless be crippled because he's made it impossible for anyone to trust him. Nobody will be going to the mat to push his policies through Congress.

But his enemies have gotten a short-term victory and a long-term loss out of their efforts to over-rule Clinton's election. They have rendered him ineffective by permanent investigations of himself and his cabinet, by smearing their reputations, and by bankrupting them with legal bills.

But they have created a longer term problem for themselves and for us by making good candidates for office decide not to subject themselves to that kind of investigation and attack. Who would be a cabinet member when special prosecutors may be lurking in the wings with unlimited money and time to investigate everything in your entire life history?

Clinton's many enemies have shown us that the quaint system we used to have of electing a president of one party and a congress of another party only works if the congress agrees its job is to work with the president to advance the national good. In the past, when Republican presidents presided over Democratic congresses, each branch curtailed the excesses of the other. The Democrats would carp about some aspects of the Republican president's agenda, but they would generally confirm his candidates and give him much of what he wanted, while the President would grudgingly sign spending bills that were more than he wanted. It was the kind of gentlemanly horse-trading that the founding fathers probably had in mind when they set up this cumbersome division of powers.

There has been nothing gentlemanly about this congress. It has used its brute power of numbers to undermine and attack the president on every front. It has refused to confirm judges and ambassadors for petty political reasons. It has subjected him and his party to continuous investigation which somehow ignores all similar offenses by Republicans. Nor did it cease attacking him when he was overseas representing America to the world, because, as Rep. Dick Armey said, "He's YOUR president" (not, as we had thought, OUR president). Congress has descended to new lows in political rhetoric, with some members calling the president "scumbag," and suggesting that Democratic policies were somehow responsible for Susan Smith killing her babies.

Perhaps Republicans will achieve their short-term goal of gaining control of both congress and the presidency. But it will be a Pyrrhic victory, for they have overlooked what is obvious even to a rock group ('Til Tuesday): "present must contain a future where both of us can fit." By creating an atmosphere of total war, and by demanding unconditional surrender, they have destroyed that future. If there is ever again a Republican president and a Democratic congress, do you really think the Democrats are going to resist the opportunity for revenge?

If the only people thinking more than six months ahead these days are the Psychic Friends Network, I think we've got some tough years ahead of us.