Consequences are what you get when you do things in the wrong order or with the wrong priorities. Most peoples number one priority would be the pursuit of happiness, but somehow things keep "breaking bad" instead of going the way we expected. Its as if there were some sort of gypsy curse turning everything we care about inside out, putting a fly in the ointment and making us wonder what we ever did to deserve this...
Even as the Obama administration is accomplishing a record number of first year acheivements to include healthcare, nuclear non proliferation, the repeal of DADT, and much much more, a perfect storm of consequences from the actions of the preceeding decade continued by the likes of Geitner, Holder and Salazar is upon us.
People have come to depend on government for law and order, social security, border security, healthcare, economic stability, education and pretty much a quick fix for everything they perceive to be going wrong.
At the same time people are scared of government because of the ease with which it can be steered in the wrong direction by lobbiests bribes and special interests corruption.
The worlds economy now has an octogenarians stability with expectations of "Ive fallen and I can't get up" forcing more and more of us to live off the grid, out of work, out of unemployment insurance, out of food, clothing, and shelter, foreclosed on and getting used to it being hip to be broke.
Even as we deny global warming and refuse to attempt to solve the problems we know about, we can already see "suprising acceleration" of climate change in the Polar Ice caps melting threatening methane releases and a whole series of other tipping points throwing us over into the relm of unforseen consequences.
Peak oil has brought us new types of panicked responses to fear of what comes next with first "drill baby drill", and now the gulf gusher's "spill baby spill".
We are locked into obsolete systems which regulate our every action from birth and marriage through working for a living, the avoidence of taxes and death. Even if we got rid of church and state interfearing in our lives there would still be the medias prompting us what to buy, where to go, what to eat, who to like and dislike.
After a while it gets to be hard to focus on what you do next. I can remember when getting out of Iraq was considered important. For that matter I can remember us wanting to get out of Vietnam. I don't remember us ever clamouring for our leaders to hurry up and find a war for us to get in on so we could keep our defense jobs.
I can't remember anyone ever asking about what we were going to do with all the no longer needed troops overseas, somehow I didn't picture us taking them out of the hellish shit of fighting and killing people only to dump them into the shitty stench of an oil polluted swamp and telling them to clean up after the mistakes of people who made trillions creating the problem and now can afford the lawyers and politicians to make the consequences for them go away.
The only thing worse than living in a time of consequences with all the stress and fear of whats gonna go wrong next and maybe destroy your family, may be seeing the bright shining hope for a future where things could get accomplished constantly doused with a bucket of slime.