There is an old saying “He who has not tasted bitter, doesn’t know what sweet is.” Well I have tasted bitter, and I don’t like it.
Yet surprisingly we as a nation continue to choose situations that are against our best interests.
We have a laundry list of social issues: universal health care, violence, insecurity, wealth inequality. However instead of trying to fix them, we are making them worse.
How are we going to thrive as individuals and a society if we don’t honestly deal with the issues we have? It feels like people get stupider everyday.
For example I heard from one TV commentator that it was a weird hill to die on when only 30% of people supported the position of the person she was discussing. How strange that we think leadership is following what people want. Slavery was popular, yet we didn’t take a poll on that. Some human rights are fundamental, and when we don’t have them, we don’t succeed as individuals and as a society.
Can you imagine JFK saying “I’d like to go to the moon by the end of the 60s if that ok with everyone. I won’t do it if the poll numbers are low.” The dangers of populism are many. While it is important to do what people want since we have representatives, it is also important to work with your constituents and explain why you are doing it. Right now we have neither. We have people who are doing things that their constituents don’t want and who aren’t explaining it honestly.
Yet we choose this. That is the funny thing. We choose to change from something that was helpful, to something that is hurting us. Why? I can only imagine it is because we wanted to feel the pain. We wanted to believe that we could have it even better and that was enough.
Now we face the real possibility of people dying because of lack of Medicaid and possibly Medicare. Stop the world, I want to get off.