We're always on the brink of disaster, if we do nothing. Luckily, we always do something, and it's quite often the right something. This is things going along "normally". When somebody does the wrong thing and disaster isn't averted, that's called "news".

Perception of the threat of looming disaster is subjective, in other words.

One take on what you describe, ER, is that perception of threat increases with age and colors the emotional context of our perceptions. It's the ancient instinct that as our bodies weaken, we're more vulnerable to attack. As social primates we map that threat perception on to our human world: It's always going to hell in a handbasket to the elderly.

It's interesting to take a survey of the very conservative, asking them to define "the good old days", a.k.a. America's "golden age". My dear old Dad Atilla the Republican defines it as the 1930s, which was was stunning to me--the middle of the Great Depression? But he explained that it was because "people had a better attitude", that all-purpose conservative phrase that encompasses work ethic, frugality, patriotism, and all the other simple American virtues.

I was struck by an oft-played video of a Tea Partier seemingly around 40 wailing "I want my America back!", and I calculate that the America she was mourning for (the "my" implying a personal experience) could not have been earlier than circa 1970.

Both were talking about childhood, of course. The time when all adults try to maintain a "better attitude" for the sake of shielding the younglings as much as possible. We all do it instinctively.

To orbit back to the point, the median age of the United States is now 37 years. For perspective, it's 24 in places like Egypt, and much of what we patronizingly call the "developing world".

Seems to me that a fundamental force at work in American politics today is the aging of the population, with the concommittant shift in perceptions of threat and priority and resulting public policy.

Running a deficit likely will really lead to financial disaster for people on a fixed income. Retirees don't view the world in the same way as people still intimately involved with it. Those still in the game generally have a different view of risk than those who'eve retired from it.

I think the median age of the HabitableZone is considerably higher than 37. Thank god for VelociraptorBlade dragging down the average! The rest of us are representative of the demographic millstone around America's neck. Hurray for us!

I'm going back to the balcony to relax in my rocking chair, and listen to the youngins setting' off their fireworks off in the distance (or is that gunfire?). Kids these days!