There are no foregone conclusions.
Except one: If you ignore problems with all your might, you cannot make them evaporate.
Instead problems blossom into full-blown crises. Perversely, we seem to crave them.

The lives of most Americans must be lacking the excitement of the early days—that frisson of fear when our neighborhood had a cholera outbreak or when we played the roulette game of childbirth. We could breathe black air and in our wood-framed, gaslit cities, fret over constant threat of fire.

We run the country as if we crave the calamity of yesteryear—constantly lurching to the brink. Sometimes we’re able to pull back from the maw, other times we let problems play out to the level of full-blown catastrophe. Like the burghers of that Vermont town, we’d much rather stand in a room and yell than constructively work toward solutions.

We enjoy scaring ourselves. Brinksmanship in the House is covered like tropical depressions on the Weather Channel. Are we caught in a Category Five hurricane? Or thrilling to a Six? Try watching CNBC’s market storm trackers without holding your breath and grabbing your wallet. Or Fox News without running for the fallout shelter. We’re addicted to every derivative of tsunami though most of us have never seen one. So we manufacture artificial amber alerts—stand-offs like “Debt Ceiling” fiascos that allow politicians to posture and sound concerned. All this scaremongering does is obscure genuine problems, which for many of us is actually kind of nice. It’s how we prefer it.

We have become a frozen tableau of contrasts. We are rich, with poverty rates at all-time highs. Homeownership is higher here than anywhere in the world, and our homelessness keeps breaking records. Almost 40 percent of adults and 20 percent of kids are obese, and more Americans will go without food today than at any time since the framers.
We are frozen in other ways.

Some call our polarization and inability to unite against problems a crisis in governance. It’s no crisis. It’s a self-inflicted wound.