Nearly a decade ago, when I was serving as a church elder and trudging through the process of budget-making, some of my colleagues advocated that we include support for several overseas missions in the budget. These missions certainly did good work, but because our church had run short of cash in recent years, we had adopted the consistent practice of not paying the missions the money we had promised.

Wouldn’t it be better, I asked, to leave them out of the budget entirely rather than make a commitment we will probably not be able to keep? One of my colleagues insisted that we needed to keep these things in the budget because we didn’t want people getting upset.

He won. He would have been great in politics.

What governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio are now facing – and several others will surely follow them – is the consequence of years spent by their predecessors refusing to see anyone get upset.

It is not a new development that states can’t financially handle the generous wage and benefit packages they’ve negotiated with their public employee unions. What’s new is that these states finally have governors and legislatures who recognize the catastrophe that awaits if they continue to pretend otherwise.

This may not be a case of these particular politicians being more clear-eyed and courageous than those who came before them. It may simply be a case of numbers so daunting that they can’t be ignored.

Then again, the union leaders and their rank-and-file are having no trouble ignoring them. As one reads the news of the protests in Wisconsin, one should understand that Gov. Walker only moved to take away the unions’ collective bargaining rights (and only when it comes to benefits, remember), after the unions refused to negotiate any changes in their contracts. When unions are asked to make concessions as a bow to economic reality, they typically respond with outrage that anyone would ask them to give up their “hard-won gains.” To a union leader, a gain is supposed to be forever.

To those of us who operate in the real economy, of course, gains can only be sustained so long as revenue supports them. If your business loses a client, you don’t go march with a protest sign that reads “UNFAIR CLIENTS SUCK . . . COME BACK!” You just have to go find yourself some new ones.

Union leaders don’t think like that, and they don’t encourage their members to think like that. To them, any proposed bow to reality must bring about about a public death match. They think nothing of comparing the governor to Hitler. Public school teachers see no reason they should not avail themselves of fake doctors’ notes so they can take “sick days” to protest. The unions’ Democratic allies in the state Senate flee the state as a matter of course to deny their chamber a quorum so as to vote on needed reforms.

This is all insane, and yet it’s par for the course with the union mentality. Anything is acceptable if it’s for the purpose of defending “hard-won gains.” And because politicians of both parties have known for years that this would happen if they ever tried to bring about economic sanity, they simply didn’t try. Why pick a fight like this? Why upset people?

Then again, if you’re never willing to upset anyone, you end up with states in perpetual budget crisis, and oh yes, a federal government running deficits well in excess of $1 trillion as far as they eye can see, while Republicans and Democrats stage a tug-of-war over minuscule cuts on the order of $28 billion.

No upsetting anyone! Even if it means national bankruptcy. Just promise to pay them what they want. Granted, we don’t have the money. But we’re the government! Can’t we just, you know, write the checks anyway?

The more we see of this stuff, the more convinced I become that elected officials in both parties simply don’t understand the reality of life – and neither do many of their employees. Things happen that upset people every day. Prices go up. Jobs are lost. Contracts are taken away. Kids need retainers and parents aren’t sure where to come up with the money.

These things suck, but they are not things from which we need some benevolent overlord to protect us. They are simply things in life we must manage through. If your way of attempting to manage problems in life is to march in a protest, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that will not be very effective. But if you’ve spent your entire life trusting your union to make sure you would never have a problem, and your union has spent years making sure to elect Democrats as your “bosses” (when in reality, it’s the unions who are the bosses of the elected officials), then no one has ever told you that the day would come when reality would smack you in the face.

Smack. That day is here. If it has you upset, the truth is you should have learned to deal with that a very long time ago.

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