A sinking ship and a rising tide of red ink

It’s hard to be a hero.

First you have to recognize a threat — then you have to analyze the threat, consider possible responses, marshal your resources and eventually ACT — with no assurance of success.

It is this last element which ensures that heroes are few and far between. If we knew that we would prevail against evil, foolishness or just plain stupidity, then we would all jump into the fray to grab our share of immortality.

But with no assurance of success, most of us just sit on the sidelines and do what people on the sidelines always do — criticize the folks who are trying to make a difference.

That makes sense as a matter of self-preservation, I suppose. Heroes have a relatively high mortality rate, after all. But what if the choice is not so simple? What if you had a choice between trying to be a hero and possibly dying ... or doing nothing and almost certainly dying? What would you do then?

That is essentially the choice facing the Congress of the United States — and by extension the rest of us — as we look into the maw of a $15 trillion national debt. Survival or death? Those are the high stakes involved for our country, and yet most folks in Congress are still reorganizing the deck chairs on the Titanic. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., had the audacity to initially propose just $32 billion in cuts from the president’s $3.8 trillion budget. Remember, that massive budget is funded with only $2.2 trillion in revenue and $1.56 trillion in borrowing. In other words, more than 40 percent of everything the U.S. government plans to spend this year is someone else’s money.

To help you grasp this concept, just write down your own annual household income on a piece of paper and multiply that by 1.7. If you make $50,000 a year, that means following the congressional spending plan you would actually be able to spend $85,000. That’s a handy chunk of change. It will make it oh so much easier to pay off your bills.

But on the other hand, since it is borrowed, you will have to make plans to pay it back — and since there is no possible way you can pay back $35,000 if you make $50,000 a year and expect to continue spending at the same rate as the previous year, the inevitable result for you and your family is bankruptcy.   

That is the inevitable result for the U.S. government, too — except they call it by some other fancy name since the federal government can’t technically declare bankruptcy. I just like to think of it as COLLAPSE.

But most politicians and most pundits are going about their everyday business as if nothing were wrong.

There are one or two exceptions — most notably, freshman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the Republican Study Committee. Paul and Jordan have stepped forward with proposals for massive cutbacks in the federal budget to try to make our spending consistent with our revenue. These reality-based plans, however, conflict with long-ingrained entitlements and feel-good programs that politicians are afraid to touch.

To many people, it seems evil to talk about cutting funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or the National Endowment for the Arts. To others it seems evil to talk about cutting military spending. But you can’t be a hero if you are afraid to do battle. Every enemy has its proponents, and so it is with spending. You cannot make a cut without hearing a loud squeal in return.

But if you want to be a hero, you have be willing to fight the dragon, and slay it. You can’t worry about the dragon’s feelings. You can’t talk about dragon rights. And you certainly can’t feed the dragon. But that is what President Obama is doing. Even though he has talked about the huge problem caused by the national debt, he plans to expand it. Most recently he is ramping up an effort to spend billions in borrowed money on high-speed rail service and high-speed wireless broadband services.

Well, slow down, Mr. President. You are going in the wrong direction.

Which brings us to another hero: The Reverend Frank Scott, who is famous for going in the right direction.

The name may not be familiar, but most of you have seen him and heard him. He preached that the individual has to try to make a difference and not wait for some higher power to rescue him from his circumstances. In short, he said: “Don’t pray to God to solve your problems. Pray to that part of God within you. Have the guts to fight for yourself. God wants brave souls. He wants winners, not quitters. lf you can’t win, at least try to win. God loves tryers.”

Still don’t recognize the Rev. Scott? He wasn’t talking about the sinking U.S. economy when he said, “Sitting on our butts isn’t gonna help us,” he was talking about a sinking ship — literally. And not the Titanic either, but rather the S.S. Poseidon.

Yep, the Rev. Scott is a fictional character played by Gene Hackman in the original 1972 film “The Poseidon Adventure,” about an ocean liner that is overturned as a result of greed. Hit by circumstances that are unusual, but by no means unpredictable, the vessel winds up capsized in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with only several dozen survivors left in the dining room. It’s not exactly the equivalent of a budget crisis, but it nonetheless provides some valuable lessons for how to handle yourself when things go topsy-turvy.

The Rev. Scott, it should be noted, did not think of the solution to his problem on his own. He was trying to do a good deed by bringing a crewman down into the dining room when a small still voice (played by character actor Red Buttons) whispered in his ear, “Isn’t it better to go up?”

It turns out that when you are in a boat that is upside down there is no point in standing still; you have to take action in order to have any hope of survival. The Rev. Scott quickly adapts, and immediately asks the other survivors to follow him into the unknown, with no certainty of survival. But that just makes him unpopular. The ship’s purser, the senior officer left alive, has convinced most of those in the dining room that the problem of an upside-down ocean liner in the middle of an ocean is not really that bad. “Help is on the way” is his mantra. “Help will be here any minute.”

Of course, the people who listen to the purser all die. There is no help on the way. The only help comes from those who, as the reverend notes, “have the guts to fight for [themselves].”

The Rev. Scott and his nine followers have no guarantee of success as they begin their perilous journey through the ship’s innards to try to reach the hull and possible safety, but it is a plain sight better than doing nothing and being drowned without a doubt.

That should be obvious, but the purser can’t stop thinking about the way things used to be — about when he was in charge of a luxurious floating hotel, complete with bands, a movie theater, stores and the good life. He doesn’t want to give up any of that, just as some good people don’t want to give up their federal subsidies for the arts, their funding for Energy Star, Family Planning, high-speed rails — you name it.

But if you follow the people who want to spend more money, you will drown. The only chance we have is to follow the people who are telling us unpleasant truths. Listen to the Rev. Scott talking about the ocean and imagine that he’s talking about a sea of red ink instead: “The sea will keep pouring in. We’ll keep settling deeper. We may even go under... before we cut our way out. But it’s a chance. We might make it...”

Fifteen trillion dollars is a lot of red ink. There is no guarantee that we can ever cut our way out of it, but if we start right now — cutting massively, pitilessly, unflinchingly — there is at least a chance. We might make it.