Thursday, June 21, 2018

Nuance

Famed 20th century journalist, H.L. Menken, wrote “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

We see the truth of the “sage of Baltimore’s” words every day these days as the Executive Branch of our national government offers yet another simple—and erroneous—fix to an incredibly complex and bedeviling challenge facing our country and the world.

Take the so-called “zero tolerance” approach to undocumented entry by non-citizens into the US…please!

Seriously, if there’s anything we ought to have “zero tolerance” for it’s the idea that there is a single one-size-fits-all-no-compromise way of dealing with immigration policy, especially one that results in the moral horror of children being separated from their parents who are simply doing what good parents have always done: taking whatever steps are necessary in their minds to provide a better life for their kids!

Instead of examining the root causes of why so many people are willing to make a treacherous journey from their home countries with the slim hope of finding safety and security in a foreign country that, ironically, was built on this very promise (but now, is rejecting that heritage out-of-hand), America’s demagogic “leader” proclaims that there is one and only one way to deal with the issue, as if simplistic stipulations alone were enough to solve problems whose causes are a result of myriad factors and forces with historical, economic, and social dimensions.

Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them;” that would be particularly apt in this case, except that it’s not obvious that any thinking whatsoever has been employed in crafting this “solution” to the problem.

Remember nuance?  Remember how authentic leaders like Jimmy Carter or Vaclav Havel or even, believe it or not, George H. W. Bush, recognized that sophisticated problems require even more sophisticated responses?

Nowadays, of course, “sophisticated” is a pejorative; oddly enough, a rather nuanced judgment in itself.

No comments:

Post a Comment