Our Depleted Reserves of Good Will

I've sort of had a more-or-less inchoate worry for a long time, and it goes something like this: there's a kind of inertia that governs human relationships. When things are going well, it's easy to keep them going well; when they're going badly, it's very hard to get them back on track. Once people get crossways with each other, it just ain't easy to get things right again. I could support that premiss if you want, but I'm not going to do so right now.

Thing is, we get along with each other fairly well in this country. When you find yourself in a situation like that, there are a couple of things you can do. You can use the happy fact of this good will to try to make things even better, to store up even more good will against the possibility of tough times in the future. If you aren't sagacious and forethoughtful enough to do that, you might at least refrain from frittering the resources away. The worst thing to do, of course, would be to just waste the reserves, using them up for bad reasons until there was just enough left to get by on, with little margin for error.

My worry is that we may be doing that last thing.

And that's all I have to say about that right now.