playing it cool

I spent this past semester studying abroad in Madrid, and even though those times were less tumultuous than these, I came away one indelible impression: Spain has never met a protest it didn't like. I am quite serious when I say that every couple of days a small group of radicals, quite possibly the same group of radicals, met in a high-traffic zone and staged a public protest. Against what, you ask? Against anything.

They protested against everything from free trade to immigration reform to the meat industry to the idea of fascism. There is a small but vocal minority of radicalized Spaniards who protest so often that people barely even notice anymore.

For whatever reason, American youths don't seem to have the same lust for teargas that our Spanish counterparts do, and certain events of this financial crisis have opened a fascinating window into our institutional mechanisms for placation. We have learned a lot since the East Asian financial crisis, during which the collapse of one weak economy precipitated an irrational regional panic which pulled the foundation out from underneath several fundamentally strong ones. The bottom line is that the only thing guaranteed to make a crisis worse is a panic to boot, and uphill though the battle may be, our government seems to have pulled out all of the stops to spread complacency.

The spectacle of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's congressional testimony this past week was almost too overt in its objectives. First he noted that the Fed expected the economy to be pulling into recovery mode by 2010, but then, when pressed, he acknowledged the possibility that the situation might actually become dramatically worse instead. Keeping in mind that this is the same man who said just seven months ago that the danger of an economic downturn appeared to have faded, this most recent testimony served to instill confidence only in those most unsavvy or desperate of investors. Think of it as a preemptive strike to defer panic.

Between the Bernanke circus and Obama's proposed 2010 budget, which spends $11,833 for every American, the government seems to be doing what it can to keep citizens complacent. One wonders, however, how long this can last. Protests are erupting en masse in nations across the globe, from the classics such as Spain and France to the more surprising such as Iceland, China and Kazakhstan. The situation has devolved into serious violence in Latvia, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Greece, to name a few. Unrest is spreading, but the questions remain: How far will this have to go before America begins to reject its morphine drip, and, in the end, how productive would populist panic really be?

For restlessness to become protest, at least in America, there has to be a spark. Here on Duke's campus, the past couple of weeks have seen some tentative dips of the toe into the realm of dissatisfaction. Specifically, the recent call for endowment transparency and the revival of Students for a Democratic Society seem to be natural expressions of the frustration felt by members of the Duke community who, amid crisis, simply want more information. At this point, Duke seems to be very, very far from powder-keg status.

It seems doubtful that Duke students will resort to rioting in the near future, and news of major upheaval in the States has been scarce. Which may not be terrible: What the financial system needs right now is liquidity. We will re-write the rules later, to be sure, and the deregulators, raters, lobbyists and captains of finance who drove the system into the ground will be put on trial for the public. Reaching for the reboot button at this point, however, is counter-productive. Building a new financial system out of the crumbs of the old one will be much, much harder than stabilizing what we have and moving forward from there.

Spanish youths' disposition towards protest is often admirable. Sometimes I think we in America have become too comfortable with the immediate, painless gratification that comes with joining a Facebook group promising to send money to Darfur. And I am by no means saying that it is our duty to be easily placated, acquiescent citizens. In fact, I think we need to up the level of noise, intellectually speaking, to let the government know exactly what we want out of economic recovery.