Supposed To Be Temporary, It Never Went Away

Temporary measures should never be something we cannot live with

Photo by Erik Witsoe

The Taliban say not letting women go to work is a temporary measure to ensure the safety of said women. We would need to be Naiveté Nobel Prize winners to believe that. They also said no Afghans would be allowed out of the country only to quickly add that of course Afghans with the right credentials would. Of course. Slip of the tongue. Whoops.

This is an extreme example, but I’m afraid we use the same logic very frequently in our lives. Temporary measures are dangerous, because they are easy. They are dangerous even in our day-to-day. Having fast food only tonight because we don’t have much time is easy, but it sets a precedent. At a societal scale, postponing an election because we are at war could make sense, but only if politicians refrain from using every future crisis to get away with such behaviour.

One of the problems with temporary measures is that temporary is an extremely vague term. The length of time is often unknown or undefined, and sometimes we don’t even know what the temporal period refers to, which makes it impossible to estimate its duration. This vagueness, though, is what makes them so powerful: because it could all be over tomorrow, we can justify doing almost anything today.