We as a nation have become so impatient with things. A good number of calls I get from work are from people who make a change to their settings on their website or other products and wonder why the change hasn’t been completed. They have bought into the notion things can happen instantly and when they don’t happen instantly they complain, argue and figure someone else messed up.

Have we forgotten that things take time?

I mean, I’ll tell people something can take 24 hours to happen, and the first thing they want to do is contradict, saying when they did it the last time it only took a an hour, 30 minutes, whatever to finish up. They’re so into “it must happen now” they forget there are things out of their control and they have to, heaven forbid, wait for things to happen.

On January 20th Obama was inaugurated and the country was happy. It’s been two weeks, two weeks of being in arguably the most important job in the world, and commentators are already talking about missteps and failure. They have the countdown clock of 100 days to judge the new President. 100 days? That’s roughly three months folks. For lots of jobs in this country your put on probation for a job with more time than three months.

We don’t want to give things time anymore. The election was one of the longest we’ve seen, then you had the transition from November until Inauguration and now with not two months, but two weeks into the new administration and folks are ready so sign things off and say it’s a bad administration.

 The mess we got into didn’t develop over two weeks, two months or two years. The economic crisis we have has developed for decades, with people wanting to live off credit and borrowing to cover borrowed money. I know someone who lives because of payday loans, and currently has four of them out. He has no money because his paycheck covers a payday loan which covers another and so on. You can’t live like that and expect to survive.

You have homeowners who are greedy. I heard a few months ago on the radio about another in the great American dream and the crash of it. There was a guy living in Florida I believe, who was an immigrant from Africa, who got caught up in the real estate scheme. Yes I call it scheme because this guy would buy a house, borrow against that house to buy a bigger house, and so on and so forth. This is how he made money. Sure, it works, to a degree, as long as you have people who are buying houses, but people weren’t buying houses to live in, they were buying house to sell to get something bigger. The house was for income, not for living. When the bottom fell out, the man from Africa lost everything. We’re talking someone who fell into the trap with the huge houses, the cars and trips. Those are all gone.

What struck me in the interview was the revelation sprinkled throughout the story. The question as to be asked; how can someone fresh off the boat from Africa, with no money in his pocket and no job, how does someone like that raise the money to buy the first home?

He didn’t. It took a while in the interview to get to that point, but it turns out though he had no job and no money, for his first house the bank ‘gave’ him the money. More to the point, he put down what he thought he would make with the house selling scheme (remember he didn’t have a job and he put down what he thought he would make) and the bank OK’d it because of the potential earnings. I’m sure the bank figured if the guy couldn’t pay for the house, they could sell it to someone else and make a profit.

The point is everyone was in it for the quick fix, and because of years of this, and industries built on this, the whole system collapsed. The same thing happened in the comic book industry in the late 80s. There were so many speculators in the market companies thought printing comics was printing money. Speculators thought, because of the success of comics like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, any comic published would pay for college in a few years. When reality set in, years later, the speculators got out, the black and white implosion occurred and the industry was devastated. It took years for the damage to be done and it took years for the industry to recover.

That’s what we face as a nation right now, and it’s not going to be fixed in 2 weeks, 2 months or 2 years. We can’t say someone’s failed in 2 weeks when the damage done wasn’t done on his watch and he’s only been on the job 2 weeks. A quick fix isn’t going to solve things because a quick shot didn’t get us into this mess. Give the man some time people!