Kill Off Debate Combat Now!
The current combative format and style of these so-called “debates” is exactly Trump’s wheelhouse. If that style continues into the general election, whoever is running against Trump will get crushed.
The current combative format and style of these so-called “debates” is exactly Trump’s wheelhouse. If that style continues into the general election, whoever is running against Trump will get crushed.
I think people always operate in their own self-interest. Always.
And I think we rarely know what someone else sees as their own self-interest. Instead, we impose on them what we believe they should be interested in.
As if on cue, a defender of the White House rushed to respond…. Yes, Benghazi. Still. Clearly, and unsurprisingly, this passionate defender missed my point (and, by doing so, reinforced my point).
Nothing that is going on now is about President Obama or Secretary Clinton. What is going on now, and in the future, is about Trump – no one else is making the decision about what we do next.
Yet he could not resist. He cannot speak unless he is attacking someone – he must always attack, always denigrate, always demean, and always cast himself as a victim of that other person’s failings.
Almost 50 years ago, I was transfixed as a NASA astronaut climbed down a ladder and pressed his boot into the grainy surface of the moon. A week ago, I sat transfixed as NASA guided a vehicle to a soft landing in Elysium Planitia, a “flat, boring equatorial plain” on a planet 300 million miles…
Were they walling people in? Or out? Both, it seems. As much as they tried to keep people in, they also tried very hard to keep western influences out. Jeans, rock’n’roll, Coca-cola, all the symbols of decadence that Americans thrust at them. The Berlin Wall sent a message. Like a giant billboard, it shouted out to us. We heard fear. We heard weakness.
You get what you measure. That’s another well-known truth in business organizations. When you want a particular kind of outcome (say, increased customer base for a lagging product), you require your workers to measure that outcome and report the results. The effect is that workers focus on improving their measurements – sometimes to the detriment…
But guns have long signaled something different in rural places than in urban ones. Just as significant, guns now signify something radically different than they did a few decades ago. In short, guns have become highly politicized, both a cause and a symbol of our nation’s accelerating polarization
This cannot be our legacy. Our children deserve better. Future generations must have time to invent, to innovate, and to thrive. We have a duty to uplift our children and our grandchildren. Our legacy to our children must be a fertile world that encourages exploration, shares discoveries, expands each other’s universe, and grows our democracy. We have a duty.
For most people, democracy only exists on election day. And for many people, the vote itself was lost long ago. For them, democracy has no place in their lives. They feel that their vote and their voice already don’t matter.
For them, losing democracy isn’t something to worry about
Let’s find a way to pay for it, whatever it costs. Because, if it’s a good thing to do, if it solves an intolerable problem, then we should do it. Not because we can afford it, but because we need it.
Because we can’t afford to not do it.