Back when I was in th’ service I received what I’d consider sound advice: Outside of combat, it’s ok to express discontent about a situation, but not if you don’t offer a solution. Because if you’re not offering a solution, you’re just focusing on the negative and that’s contagious and destroys morale. Basically, if you don’t have a solution the only sensible course of action is to accept or embrace the situation and soldier on. As far as I can tell, this is a core belief of every successful person I know.
Politicians are wonderfully snaky about employing this line of thinking because their success is based more on bitching about how messed up The Other Guy is; and far less on coming up with actual solutions. Outwardly, this is a paradox, but it’s really not. They hate being unemployed or under someone else’s control. So rather than bitch about it, like my uncle Ed who would rather live in poverty than give his time to The Man for a buck, they get themselves a job. They know people love to bitch, so they incite people to bitch rabidly against their competition and then offer themselves up as the solution (and what a work-saver! The one thing people like more than bitching is to have solutions handed to them because it’s easier than coming up with one of your own). Once in power, they get to ride the wave of success for years because the one thing people hate more than coming up with solutions to their own problems is admitting they bought a solution that was wrong!
I think President Obama may not have fully understood this principle even though he used it to get his current job. He forgot to keep on bitching once he got the keys to The Whitehouse, or at least he has underbitched. Because now his competition, who bitched about what he was bitching about during the campaign is bitching about him not doing anything about what he was bitching about in the first place. As a result, even the people who bought his bitching have started bitching to the point that they’re strengthening the position of people who will REALLY give them something to bitch about. But do they care? No, because if they begin to care then they’ll need to stop bitching and start coming up with solutions to compete with their bitchy opponents’. And even educated liberals are human, too. Which means they’d rather bitch.
I don’t really know what to do about any of it. I just wanted to vent. Thank you for your support.
The way I do it is this: While I have political opinions, I’m not a complainer. I try to arrange my life as well as possible under whatever the current circumstances.
If the people I support get into office, great. If not, I’m prepared to handle that as well. It’s like having a diversified investment portfolio so you can deal with whatever happens in the economy.
It’s been pretty successful for me so far. I have a great life compared to a lot of people I know.
Well, the problem is that the people who suffer in a situation usually do not have the power to change it. So, they bitch enough to annoy the people with power enough that they change it.
But that’s government; in the workplace, such as the military or my office, I vote for your approach.
Me handing an upcoming week’s schedule that I hurridly try to put together despite my serious lack of training: Sir, by the looks of things, we’re quite fucked.
Airman McNally, you can’t keep coming to me saying things like “we’re fucked.” If there’s a problem I’d like for you to at least attempt to come up with a solution.
Yes sir, I’ll try. Here’s the schedule though and see if you can come up with anything.