Review and Comment: Reaction
Years ago, when General Motors had begun the slide from which it has only recently recovered, I was in Detroit as part of my research into urban highways, waiting to interview a GM executive. On the bulletin board in the waiting room was posted: “The only one who likes change is a wet baby.” To GM’s great cost, that was only too symptomatic of the corporation’s response to Japanese competition. GM wanted only to go on building big gas guzzlers.
Well, a lot of other people don’t like change even as others crave it. The Arab Spring has thrown panic into the likes not only of Bashar al-Assad, the late Moammar Qaddafi, the mullahs of Iran, and the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, but it has also shaken the rulers of Russia and China. Last week’s veto by those two superpowers of a Security Council resolution to support an Arab League plan promoting peaceful change in Syria underscored their anxiety about the threat of democracy. Russia’s Vladimir Putin faces his own challenge to power and mobilizes demonstrations that support him even as he evidently doesn’t feel secure enough to crush the bigger ones against him. The Chinese ever since Tienanmen Square have been quick to quash signs of democratic opposition. All of these blame popular unrest on foreign influences from the U.S. and Europe — which has some truth insofar as the West is home to democracy, though it ignores the deep dissatisfactions among their own citizens.
But it’s a two-way street. Here in the U.S. we read of Americans who see all efforts to limit damage to the environment as part of a United Nations plot. As Saturday’s New York Times reported, Tea Party supporters have been mobilizing against the non-binding but sweeping Agenda 21 adopted by the UN in 1992 “to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas.” At a time that technology has been advancing at a breakneck pace, and science can tell us far more about the universe we inhabit than ever before, a willfully ignorant, xenophobic spirit has gripped a surprisingly large segment of the American populace. Like General Motors those years ago, many Americans don’t want to face the reality that our growing world population is dangerously depleting the resources of the Earth we live on, affecting the air and the oceans, changing our climate and eating up open land.