In the wake of the most recent mass shooting – this time, in a Florida school – many commentators are noting, sadly, that tragedies like this have become the “new normal.” I disagree – tragedies like this have become “all too common“, but I reject the notion that this is “normal“, whether new or old….
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.
We are now being tested, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. What progress we have won seems to be slipping away, not by the natural forces of time and change, but by the sinister forces of greed and wealth and power and deceit. Like our predecessors whose radical ideas have gone before, we must persist.
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…
Give 30 minutes to walk out and return, then give an hour to study of these basic tenets of being a citizen in the US, their history, the difficulties of conflicts between rights and safety, how bills become law, and how protests change (or don’t change) law, how courts decide conflicts.
Basic civics education.
Uncertainty damages business … and people too. Too bad about the student loan forgiveness plan. I remember (in 2012) when the Bush tax cuts of 2003 were scheduled to expire. Republicans raised a hue and cry about the “uncertainty” that this cast upon our economy. Businesses didn’t know how to plan – should they expect…
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
In liberal views, if people donʻt benefit – if wages donʻt go up with productivity, if houses arenʻt affordable, if medical bankruptcies are rising, if school debt is crushing, if lives are lost – then the economy is failing.
We trust in the institution of government, a government that is, in the end, made up of all of us, all of the people, a government that creates the law by which we agree to be governed.
A wall is a nightmare. A wall is the opposite of what America offers the world. A wall says:
America is Closed
America must never be closed.
