Nothing Is Broken That Wasn’t Chosen

How avoidance and inertia became governing strategies

For a long time, it was possible to mistake local stability for national health. The trash still got picked up. The paycheck still cleared. Schools opened. Roads were paved. The machinery of life kept moving, and that motion made it easy to believe that whatever was wrong could be handled later.

That belief only holds in a world where time is abundant and threats are distant. We no longer live in that world. Inaction is not neutral anymore.

There was a time when leadership meant naming hard challenges and asking the public to meet them. Not because they were easy, but because they were worth doing. We used to organize our energies around shared problems, and a future people could imagine living in. That kind of leadership accepted risk openly, distributed sacrifice visibly, and treated postponement as a choice with consequences.

What replaced it wasn’t always malice. It was avoidance.

Over decades, hard decisions were delayed in exchange for temporary calm. Next quarter’s gains and the next election cycle’s campaign were financed by mortgaging the future. Public pain was treated as a short-term inconvenience to manage, while private advantage quietly accumulated for those positioned to extract it. The bill did not disappear. It passed forward, and downward.

Avoidance became a governing style because it worked. It reduced conflict. It preserved careers. It allowed leaders to claim responsibility for stability without paying the price of reform. But avoidance does not release pressure. It stores it.

And stored pressure hardens into policy.

Inertia is not the absence of decision. It is decision without accountability. No one cancels the safety net – they just never fund maintenance of it. No one admits failure – they “pivot”. No one takes responsibility for the problem – they ask the public to adapt to it.

The posture is survivable when institutions are operating in good faith. It becomes lethal when bad-faith actors arrive. Avoidance creates vacuums. Vacuums do not remain empty. They are filled by people who are not hesitant, not restrained, and not ashamed to use power.

That is where we are now.

In the absence of affirmative, credible leadership toward a future people can believe in, power is increasingly exercised through fear, blame, and erosion. Stability is not strengthened – it is weaponized. Institutions are not repaired – they are captured. The public is told, implicitly or explicitly, that survival is a private responsibility and that the best you can do is keep your head down.

It is obviously wrong to be the thief or the vandal. But it is also unconscionable to hold the door open while others loot what remains. Being an accomplice does not require spectacle. It requires only silence, caution, and the insistence that now is not the right time to act.

“Getting along to go along” once passed for pragmatism. In a time of active decline, it becomes abdication.

Nothing about our condition is accidental. It is the cumulative result of choices not to choose, of challenges postponed until they metastasized, of stability defended locally while it is hollowed out nationally. The era when avoidance could masquerade as responsibility is over.

The question now is simple. Who is willing to take responsibility for what comes next?