A map to our future

The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.—Paul Simon

There's a great scene in the movie Enemy at the Gates, about the Battle for Stalingrad. The Nazis are winning, and the Soviet leaders are desperate to find a way to make their troops fight better. What about shooting cowards to make an example of them? Tried that. Hmmm. Threaten their families? Tried that too.

Finally, a junior commissar musters the courage to speak up: "We could try giving them hope!"

What? Give the men hope for a better future? What an extraordinary thought! However, they've run out of other ideas, and have little left to lose. They try it, and it works.

That wasn't the case in the election campaign that just ended. Nobody really offered us very much hope. Stripped of all the fancy graphics and rococo bullshit, the slogans for both parties really came down to something like, "Vote for me. The other guys are worse." I'll bet that got a lot of people really excited about voting.

Three days before the election, I found myself squatting in an emergency veterinary clinic in Madison Heights, after my Australian shepherd puppy helped their economy by eating a large zinc screw.

While waiting for vomiting and my bill, I talked to the some of the other two-legged clients. They were worried about the future, about educating their kids and getting or keeping a job themselves. None of them mentioned politics, the candidates, the president, anything. They were merely trying to scratch out decent lives.

My sense was that, whether they voted or not, they saw politics and politicians as largely irrelevant to their everyday existence.

Well, we've just voted, a scattering of us anyway, and we've picked a new crowd of leaders. Thanks to the Metro Times' deadlines, I had to write this before knowing who they would be. But what I do know is that when the new governor takes over on Jan. 1, he will be faced with a huge looming deficit in next year's budget — at least $1.6 billion. Worse, he will have made promises that, if he sticks to them, will send that deficit even higher.

Plus, the current year's budget will turn out to be really out of balance — and money will have to be found to close that gap too. There's no more stimulus and no more "fat" to cut. The new governor is going to have to make some hard choices, and do it fast, without any time for a learning curve.

What's even harder is that no governor can do this alone; anything has to be passed by both houses of the Michigan Legislature. Next year, this will be amateur hour. Thanks to our moronic system of term limits, the majority of the lawmakers who take office in two months will be new. Depending on final tallies, as many as 100 of our 148 lawmakers may be new to their jobs.

None of the "experienced" ones will have been there more than four years. They will face a series of hard choices. Ultimately, they can choose to raise taxes on those still working, and/or extend the sales tax to services in what has become a largely service economy. The new lawmakers could raise fees for things like hunting licenses, and boost the beer tax for the first time since they lowered it in 1966.

> Email Jack Lessenberry