The Reset We Keep Ushering In, Part I — The Problem

Guest Opinion by Alicia Haggermaker

Every generation likes to believe it’s living through a unique crisis. In reality, what’s familiar isn’t the moment — it’s the response.

When systems strain, we don’t correct the inputs.

We reset the outputs and call it resilience.

We treat collapse as fate instead of an engineered outcome.

Then we act surprised when it happens again — faster, harsher, and with less room to recover.

This isn’t accidental—it’s a pattern.

Resets Are Not Renewal — They’re Deferred Accountability

A reset sounds productive. It feels decisive. But, most resets aren’t repairs. They’re postponements.

They move costs forward in time:

• Debt instead of investment
• Burnout instead of redesign
• Enforcement instead of prevention
• Blame instead of correction
• They don’t fix systems.
• They reassign the bill.

And the bill almost always lands on:

• Workers
• Families
• Local communities
• The next generation

We call it resilience when people survive what never should have happened.

How Structural Failure Gets Rebranded as Personal Failure

One of the most effective ways to avoid fixing a system is to moralize its outcomes.

If people are struggling, we’re told it’s because of:

• Poor choices
• Weak discipline
• Lifestyle inflation
• Entitlement

This is where the familiar scolding shows up: 

• Stop buying lattes.
• Cancel your subscriptions.
• Live within your means like your grandparents did.

Yes — lifestyle inflation exists. Convenience costs money. But, that explanation collapses under minimal scrutiny.

Previous generations didn’t just drink cheaper coffee.

They lived inside an economic structure that no longer exists — and many of them actively supported the policies that dismantled it.

• Housing wasn’t financialized.
• Wages tracked productivity.
• Healthcare didn’t consume paychecks.
• Education wasn’t a debt trap.
• Pensions pooled risk.
• Infrastructure was publicly funded.

When those structures were stripped, the response wasn’t repair—it was personalization of blame.

That’s not accountability—it’s misdirection.

External Fixes, Internal Neglect

This same logic shows up beyond domestic policy.

For generations, instability has been treated as something that can be corrected from the outside:

• Replace leadership
• Apply force
• Impose standards
• Declare order restored

The Monroe Doctrine is an early, explicit example of this mindset — stability framed as something to be enforced externally rather than built internally.

Control justified as protection. Intervention treated as prevention.

The assumption is always the same: that order can be imposed, legitimacy bypassed, and coherence installed by power.

It interrupts chaos without addressing cause.

It delays collapse without reducing fragility.

And it justifies repetition under new names.

You can remove a threat.

You cannot install internal coherence.

Self-sufficiency doesn’t mean isolation.

It means the ability to function — especially when guidance is incomplete, delayed, or wrong.

The Credibility Problem No One Wants to Name

There is something deeply inverted about a country struggling with:

• unaffordable housing
• decaying infrastructure
• medical system strain
• political paralysis
• rising internal instability

…claiming the authority to correct other nations’ failures.

This isn’t about denying that problems elsewhere exist—it’s about credibility.

Authority doesn’t come from force alone. It comes from coherence.

You can’t export order when you’re importing dysfunction.

You can’t teach stability while modeling volatility.

And you can’t claim moral authority abroad while governing through crisis at home.

Intervention without internal coherence isn’t leadership—it’s displacement.

The contradictions don’t disappear because they’re uncomfortable—they compound.

When the Pattern Is Still Warm

It’s easy to see this logic in hindsight.

It’s harder to recognize it while it’s unfolding.

The reset impulse doesn’t wait for collapse to announce itself—it appears the moment instability rises and certainty rushes in to fill the gap.

Public discourse narrows quickly.

Structural failures are reframed as external threats.

Calls for restraint are dismissed as naïveté.

Control is presented as responsibility — and speed becomes proof of seriousness.

Different sides invoke different virtues.

They reach for the same tools.

This is the reset impulse in its earliest form.

Not after collapse — before it.

Ping-Pong Is Not Governance — It’s System Failure

When systems lack durable foundations, they oscillate.

• Policies swing.
• Rules reverse.
• Each election becomes existential.
• Every “win” is temporary.

Voting selects leadership—it does not stabilize systems.

If every correction can be undone by the next cycle, nothing has been repaired. We’ve layered temporary restraint on top of fragility and hoped virtue would hold.

It doesn’t.

People can’t plan.

They can’t build.

They can’t trust continuity.

Exhaustion becomes the background condition of civic life.

The Question We Keep Avoiding

Resets don’t fail because people are lazy or immoral—they fail because the structures that create collapse are preserved.

You can’t reset your way out of neglect.

You can’t punish your way to regulation.

And you can’t exhaust a society into health.

So the real question isn’t whether another reset is coming.

It’s this:

Do we keep sending the bill forward — or do we finally pay it where it’s created?

Alicia Boothe Haggermaker is a lifelong resident of Huntsville, Alabama, and a dedicated advocate for health freedom. For more than a decade, she has worked to educate the public and policymakers on issues of medical choice and public transparency. In January 2020, she organized a delegation of physicians and health freedom advocates to Montgomery, contributing to the initial draft of legislation that became SB267.

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