Daily Bread for 12.9.25: Three, Three, and Three (They’re All Different)

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:14 and sunset is 4:20 for 9 hours 6 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 72.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Board of Zoning Appeals meets at 5 PM and the Public Works Committee at 5:15 PM.

On this day in 1775, British troops and Loyalists, misinformed about Patriot militia strength, lose the Battle of Great Bridge, ending British rule in Virginia.

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We live in emotional, dyspeptic times. This is perhaps more true today even than in 1972, when Anthony Downs wrote, in National Affairs, about an issue-attention cycle concerning ecological policy. Downs observed that

a systematic “issue-attention cycle” seems strongly to influence public attitudes and behavior concerning most key domestic problems. Each of these problems suddenly leaps into prominence, remains there for a short time, and then though still largely unresolved–gradually fades from the center of public attention. A study of the way this cycle operates provides insights into how long public attention is likely to remain sufficiently focused upon any given issue to generate enough political pressure to cause effective change.

See Anthony Downs, Up and down with ecology — the “issue-attention cycle” , Nat’l Affs., Summer 1972, at 38.

I’ll borrow Downs’s concept and apply it a bit differently: there’s (in this time, our time) a public reaction in the first three hours, then the first three days, and later in the first three months. What begins so strongly as to appear irresistible in three hours looks less so after three days and looks again wholly different after three months.

Social media undoubtedly plays a role — a deceptive one — in persuading that the first three hours’ reaction will carry the day. That’s seldom likely, not merely because feeling fades, but more so because counterclaims on the same topic or other topics entirely emerge. What seems so certain, so inevitable, seldom is.

Perhaps someone who holds a minority ideological position, as I do, sees this more easily: many efforts begin initially as a defensive position against a larger, often majority, opinion. If all the engagement were decided in three hours’ time, well, that would be difficult; most engagements stretch, by contrast, over days and months.

Look around: how many supposedly decisive moments in the news, how many this-changes-everything declarations look different after only a few months? Many, often most, of them.

If one stays steady for mere hours and days, making good use of that time, the months produce a different result than initial responses suggested.

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