Economic Woes and Bashing

Your editorial (Jan. 25) is a grand example of the wide-scale indifference toward our nation’s serious economic plight. After conceding to a little bashing on the part of both Japan and America, you suggest the problem is really one of misplaced attitudes: “The job for America is to focus on the facts and stop getting taken off course by the destructive emotion.” Really! As if this change of outlook will mollify the discontent. That is exactly our problem. It will exaggerate it. In reality, we have politely refused to accept fact in exchange for fiction.

A $40-billion trade imbalance does not develop because Americans are lazy, illiterate or unproductive, or that the Japanese are any better than us. It happens because we possess a certain naivete mixed with distorted sense of self-aggrandizement. We have lost that old-fashioned horse sense that once made Americans innovative and self-sufficient. Now we are being conned by the best of them.

The problem is that while we have been amassing the “best” of life’s trinkets, the Japanese have been picking our pockets. Our values are what are misplaced. Not our perceptions of the facts. And we should be damn emotional about it. Even our top executives and federal trade negotiators are committing economic treason with impunity. Quadrupling their salaries, hundreds of American trade representatives have gone to the other side to divulge our secrets for hire. Everything can be had for a price.

But the Japanese are not really to blame. We are the fools who have left ourselves open and vulnerable, and we are the ones who have sold our lives into poverty. But the malady is certainly not irreversible if we wise up and really see the difference between fact and fiction.

RONALD CHARLES NESBITT

Orange