Believe it or not, I really am a cheerful and optimistic sort, but the reaction to some of my latest blogs brings up several points that bear repeating, although some of my readers clearly don’t need the reminders, because their comments show understanding.  First, a writer is not just what he or she writes. Second, critical assessment, particularly if it’s accurate, of an institution or a societal practice is not always “negative.”  Third, solutions aren’t solutions until and unless they can be implemented.

Readers can be strange creatures, even stranger than authors, at times.  I know an author who writes about the experiences of a white trash zombie.  She’s a very warm person and not at all either white trash or a zombie.  And most readers have no problem understanding that.  Yet, all too often, some readers have great difficulty in understanding that just because a writer accurately portrays a character with whose acts or motivations they disagree it doesn’t necessarily mean the character represents the author.  I’ll admit that some of my characters do embody certain experiences of mine – especially those who are pilots of some sort or involved in government – but that still doesn’t mean that they’re me.  Likewise, just because I point out what I see as problems in society doesn’t mean that I’m a depressed misanthrope.

As I and others have said, often, the first step to solving a problem is recognizing it exists. On a societal level, this is anything but easy. Successful societies are always conservative and slow to change, but societies that don’t change are doomed.  The basic question for any society is how much and how fast to change, and the secondary questions are whether a change is necessary or inevitable… or beneficial, because not all change is for the best.

One of the lasting lessons I learned in my years in Washington, D.C., is that there is usually more than one potential and technically workable solution to most problems.  At times, there are several. Very, very, occasionally, there is only one, and even then there is the possibility of choosing not to address the problem.  And every single solution to a governmental problem has negative ramifications for someone or some group so that addressing any problem incorporates a decision as to who benefits and who suffers. Seldom is there ever an easy or simple solution.  And, of course, as voters we don’t get to choose that solution; we only get to vote for those who will, and often our choice isn’t the one who gets elected.

For that reason, my suggested course of action is almost never to vote for any politician who promises a simple or easy solution.  If two candidates promising simple solutions are running, vote for the one who incites less anger or whose solution is “less simple.”

This electoral emphasis on simplicity has always been present in American politics, but in the past, once the campaign was over, politicians weren’t so iron-clad, and didn’t always insist on a single simple answer/solution. I saw the beginning of the change in the late 1970s, and it intensified in the Reagan Administration. For example, when I was at the Environmental Protection Agency, there was a large group of people who were totally opposed to hazardous waste landfills or incinerators – anywhere.  In addition, and along the same lines, to this day, we don’t have a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel.  I’m sorry, but in a high tech society with nuclear power plants, you need both.  The waste isn’t going away, and the products we use and consume generate those wastes.  Right now there is NO technology that can generate high tech electronics without creating such wastes, and to make matters worse, the cleaner the technology, the more expensive it is, which is why a lot of electronic gear isn’t manufactured in the USA.  Likewise, the immigration problem won’t go away so long as the United States offers the hope of a better life for millions of people.  We can’t effectively seal the borders.  Nor can we deport all illegal aliens, not without becoming a police state along the lines of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. There are no simple solutions that are workable.  Period.

The current legislative gridlock in Washington, D.C., reflects the iron-clad insistence by each party, and especially, I’m sad to say, the Republicans, that their “solution” is the only correct one.  It’s not a solution if roughly half the people in the country, or half the elected representatives [or a minority large enough to block legislation], oppose it, because it’s not going to get adopted, no matter what its backers claim for it.  In practice, in our society, any workable solution requires compromise.  When compromise fails, as it did over the issue of slavery, the result can only be violence in some form. Unhappily, as I’ve said before, the willingness to work out compromise solutions has declined. In fact, politicians willing to compromise are being branded as traitors.  So are politicians who try to forge alliances across party lines.  So… my suggested solution is to vote for officials who are open to compromise and vigorously oppose those who claim that compromise is “evil” or wrong, or un-Democratic, or un-Republican.  No… it’s not a glamorous and world-shaking solution. But it’s the only way we have left to break the logjam in government.  Until lots of people stop looking for absolute and simple solutions and start agitating for the politicians to work together and hammer things out… they won’t.  Because the message given to every politician out there right now has been that compromise kills political careers.

So we can all stick to our hard and fast principles – and guns, if it comes to that – and watch nothing happen until everything falls apart… or we can reject absolutist politics and get on with the messy business of politics in a representative democratic republic.