Back in the mid-90s, I was a daily, hard news reporter covering the welfare reform debacle. And it became clear at a certain point that things were not going well — that conservative ideology was winning the day on at least the federal level, if not the state and local too.

Granted, this turned out to be not too much of a problem. We didn’t know it, but we were at the beginning of one of the fastest and biggest economic expansions in world history. Nevertheless, right then, we were coming out of the recession of the early-90s and so there was a lot of consternation about what these big changes to the social safety net might mean.

It looked really grim.

I remember, I was on the phone with one of the strongest liberal critics of the proposals and, suddenly, I stopped the conversation and asked her point blank: “What do you think is really going to happen? I mean, actually happen?”

She paused.

“Off the record?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What’s going to happen is what always happens. Somehow, we’ll muddle through. It’s what we always do. We make things better, someone comes along and wrecks it. We make things bad, people step in and mitigate. This is the true nature of humanity: to muddle. Human beings are, at their very best and worst, all the same. We are muddlers.”

I’ve been thinking about that as I do all this work on climate change, sustainability, the economic crisis and the potential catastrophe just outside our line of sight.

But then, just by accident, something comes along that throws this idea into stark relief. Today, it was Hiroyuki Furudera’s (aka Hir0) photostream on flickr.

It’s beautiful.

But finding random things of such beauty also makes me wonder. If “muddling” is our nature, then there must be equal and opposite forces out there too.

And that gives me just as much reason to pause as it does to disbelieve.

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