Green Light, Red Light
Much of the human race is chronically bad, even incompetent, at taking a long term view on anything. Maybe this attitude hails from the days when humans were living in caves and ice ages came by unexpectedly from time to time, freezing everything and everyone, leaving random boulders lying around, and making long term planning pointless. Or maybe the reward pathways in human brains have accidentally gotten too big over the millennia, making us slaves to instant gratification.
This dubiously endearing trait manifests itself in many ways. Take, for example, the green light, red light theory. It goes like this. Some people are green light planners. When planning on going somewhere, they calculate how long it will take to get there assuming that all of the traffic lights along the way will be green, there will be no traffic jams, and the roads will all be clear. If everything goes right, they get where they’re going on time. But if anything, anything at all, goes wrong, they will be late.
And the most amazing thing about these people is that they will say with a straight face that they don’t know how they were late, it wasn’t their fault, they left with plenty of time to spare. Au contraire.
Red light planners, on the other hand, calculate how long it will take assuming that all of the lights will be red, there will be some traffic delays, and at least one road will be closed necessitating a longer, more circuitous, detour. This way, if everything goes wrong, they are on time. And if things don’t go wrong, they are early, which is not as scary a state as some (read: green-lighters) would have us believe.
In the end this is really about instant gratification. Green light planners want to keep doing whatever they’re doing in the moment. Leaving “early” would mean potentially wasting time by arriving early (gasp). Much easier to assume that things will work out and then be able to continue watching that show or playing that Nintendo game a little longer.
One of my favorite (read: drives me crazy) examples is people who go out the night before they are supposed to leave on a car trip. They say they are going to make it an early night so that they can get up early and leave. But inevitably they end up out late, have a few too many drinks, and the next morning end up leaving hours later than they meant to. At the bar the night before it was a question of whether to have more fun in the moment and assume everything would work out the next day, or admit that probably there would be some red lights (hangover, lack of sleep) and that leaving on time means planning for those roadblocks.
On a much more sobering note, the lack of long term planning has serious consequences for the state of world affairs as well. Take, for example, the article in the New York Times from May 4th of this year about education in Pakistan. The article describes a typical public school with mud floors and no windows where 140 students spill out of the classroom into the courtyard.
Instead of sending their children to this school where they cannot learn, parents are increasingly choosing to send their children to madrasas—religious schools. At many of these schools children learn nothing more than the Koran, and are taught fundamentalist, even extremist, Islamic beliefs. Many of them will join the Taliban and fight against the United States in Afghanistan.
The red light planner’s strategy would be to look down the road and see that there are many roadblocks along the way. The key to getting to a worthwhile endpoint is to put resources towards addressing the roadblocks early on. Put money towards improving schools and resources for these poor families. Then, slowly, the flow of militants will ebb.
The green light strategy would be to assume everything will be fine and that the only problem is the militants at the end of the road. Green lighters would ignore the road itself, a road that will necessitate a much different approach if one ever hopes to get to a good endpoint. They would fight the militants while ignoring the conditions that are producing more militants and hope everything will work out.
So which way have we gone? Together, the United States and Pakistan have put their collective thinking caps on. And what have they come up with? The green light plan, of course. $1 billion annually to the military and only $600 million for ALL non-military needs, a small percentage of which goes to education.
This is the same logic that had us destroying Baghdad without planning on how to rebuild it, bombing water pipelines without bringing in drinking water for civilians, and knocking out power plants without guaranteeing people a quick return of electricity. It utterly fails to look at the long term situation and focuses instead on instant gratification.
Here’s hoping that when President Obama looks out at the plethora of problems he has on his plate, he sees a whole row of red lights leading up to each one. And as for the rest of us, here’s hoping that we can put aside our need for instant gratification long enough to give our new president a chance to come up with a long term plan to make real change rather than demanding action that, while immediate, may be completely ineffectual in the end.
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