Here's a question we don't ask nearly enough:
“What could possibly go wrong?”
For instance, when“the adults in the room” start throwing around the term “sanctuary city,” someone should be asking, “What could possibly go wrong?” Even the duller knives in the drawer (persons not unlike some of us) could have seen a dark moon rising.
Even slack-jawed, meat-and-potatoes, big-government skeptics like us, way out here in deepest Flyover Country, had doubts about offering sanctuary to people. Couldn't that get out of hand? You mean sanctuary from the laws the rest of us have to obey? Is that a promise we should be making, especially in our biggest cities, where they already have lots of problems? Let's think about this, guys.
Of course, this was a mistake the brighter bulbs in the pack were bound to make, because they couldn't resist sending the message that they care more about people than we do. The adults in the room know they are much smarter than us (just ask them), that they're more generous than us (typically with money borrowed from our grandchildren), and they're just all-around better people than us.
Duh.
Imagine their surprise, though, now that the Head Democrat has thrown open the borders, and hoards of people who have entered the country illegally are sleeping in airports, at police stations, and in emergency shelters in our biggest cities. (We even have people sneaking in from Canada, who comedian Garrison Keillor once dubbed “frostbacks.”) Suddenly, sanctuary isn't cool anymore, and they're talking about cutting police protection and garbage collection in New York to pay for all that swell sanctuary.
In the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”
Who, I ask you, could have seen this coming?
(Us.)
Likewise with the swell plan, dreamed up by people vastly more intelligent than us, with lots of letters attached to their names, to take moderately dangerous viruses into a lab and soup them up into something really scary, then fool around with them and maybe think up some treatment that could save humanity from the menace they created, if it got loose.
Don't laugh. It could happen. (I think it DID happen.)
(As an entire planet full of people who have already gotten Covid thanks to insanity like this, it's pretty clear that we've all got a dog in this fight.)
“On second thought,” some prescient person in a position of authority could have said, “maybe it's a bad idea to make viruses more deadly than nature makes them all by itself. So maybe this is an example of a sleeping dog we shouldn't poke.”
Actually, President Barack Obama reportedly said something like that, and told the scientists to knock off the “gain of function” horsing around, at least here in the United States. But the scientists figured out a way to send money to China (our tax dollars at work), and let them goose viruses into something more deadly, maybe in the name of science, or maybe just for something to do. And if something went wrong, they could blame it on the “wet market,” or pangolins.
What could possibly go wrong? China. The notoriously sloppy Wuhan Lab. In a nuclear-armed country bent on secrecy and enslaving people they don't like. Where's your spirit of adventure? Don't worry. Be happy. In the immortal words of Alfred E. Neuman, “What, me worry?”
Another example: Electric cars. (I like to think of them as “coal cars.”) They're too expensive. Too heavy. They don't sell. And they require lots of electricity at a time when we're bent on closing down coal-fired power plants, we've turned our nose up at natural gas, they want to tear down hydro dams in the Pacific Northwest, nuclear plants are too complicated, off-shore wind towers are making whales beach themselves, the antiquated power grid is unreliable, and brownouts are common in California, the very state that says all new cars will have to be electric by 2035.
What could possibly go wrong?
(I don't know about you, but I'm pretty disappointed in the adults in the room.)
Dave Simpson can be reached at: DaveSimpson145@Hotmail.com
