The Search for Solutions

“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” — John F. Kennedy, Speech at Loyola College Alumni Banquet, Baltimore, Maryland, 18 February, 1958.

We face difficult problems.

Our schools need to begin to provide instruction to students again. Children need to be with their friends. Teachers are more effective in person than online. And yet, we’ve already seen disastrous results from the efforts of states like Georgia to open their brick and mortar schools. The state’s largest district has already had more than 250 employees test positive for coronavirus. One Elementary School had a student test positive the first day.

We are in the midst of a pandemic that, as of August 7, 2020, has killed more than 700,000 of our brothers and sisters. It has caused economic hardships too vast to hope to explain. It has deepened our ideological divisions.

Our societies are tearing themselves apart with civil unrest all over the world. Protesters are being conflated with arsonists, looters, and vandals. Buildings are burning. People have died. There is no end in sight.

In the midst of our ever widening ideological divides, it is easy to support the answer the loudest voices on your team advocate.

I want to put aside our ideologies for a little while and look for Common Ground. I would like to pose questions that I believe everyone, from every set of beliefs, agree need to be answered. Our answers to these questions may well differ. I would expect nothing else. As it turns out, I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I’m not sure I have many at all. But, I’m going to give it a shot. If you would like to propose alternative answers, I would love to hear them.

Question 1:

How do we teach our children safely?

This question, I think unmasks some of the real issues of public education. There are several reasons Americans need an answer to this question.

1. Parents need free Daycare. Over most of our lifetimes, we have become accustomed to our children being at school from roughly 7:30 AM to 3 PM. This allows parents to work for those hours without needing to provide supervision for their children. After 3 PM (most Americans work something like 9 to 5), the older children are latchkey kids. They take care of themselves with highly variable degrees of success. Younger children have to go to a Day Care or some other form of supervision which often costs money. Some schools, recognizing this difficulty, implement after school programs for students, with the same highly variable rates of success. Without free Day Care, families are faced with a multitude of problems, not the least of which is ensuring the safety of their children.
2. Parents need time away from their children. No matter how much parents love their children, they simply need a break from time to time. Raising children is as exhausting as it is vital. School often provides parents a few hours alone to collect their thoughts and refresh.
3. Employers need employees to come to work. No business can function without its employees to perform the tasks that need to be completed for the business to run. They need their employees to be able to do the job without worrying about whether their children are safe.

If we can begin by recognizing that these are some of the problems, then perhaps we can work together to solve them. I’m going to offer some answers. If you don’t think mine will work, I invite you to offer alternative answers. You can leave a voicemail at (480) 331–9822. I will play your comment on the air and respond.

1. Spend the time and the money to create small Day Care Centers that are safe. This will require a significant amount of scientific research. How can we design areas that can have children together in an enclosed area safely? Honestly, I don’t know if we can. The idea that we need to reopen schools for in person instruction is supported by both The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and The American Federation of Teachers (AFT). In person schools provide the best opportunity for children to thrive. They deliver essential services that are difficult, if not impossible, to deliver online. There will, however, undoubtedly be times when schools cannot reopen safely. This must be determined locally, and based on science instead of politics. For those times when schools must close, it would be helpful to have software that connects people in small communities to one another, such that they can find the means of providing the essential child care. Facebook groups, and other social media, may be useful, but I would like to see a larger area to find such help. A functioning government website would be ideal. That would require funding and people to make it work. Someone once pointed out, “It takes a village.”
2. For those who need time away from their children, the solution I just proposed will, I believe answer that need.
3. If employers want their employees back, the first thing that needs to happen is to make work conditions safe. Ending the pandemic would end the problem entirely. Until that solution is available, let’s invest in helping businesses create safer working conditions. For those that can’t be made safe, let’s send the businesses enough money to stay afloat, and let’s ensure that all of its employees have enough money to make ends meet.

Question 2:

How do we save the most lives?

This question also unmasks some real issues about the economy. We have a significant number of people who believe the economy must be based on how hard people work. Those who don’t work hard don’t deserve to survive. While the pandemic has made it impossible for many people to work, this argument falls flat. You can’t say, “get a job!” to someone whose job was made impossible by the pandemic. This presents three basic problems on which I believe most of us will agree.

1. People, in general, must work in order to survive. Unless one is among the fortunate few who lives off of a Trust Fund, someone else’s money, or who has inherited sufficient money to ensure they never need to work again, one has to have a job in order to meet their survival needs. Without a job, one might hope for Unemployment. I’ve written and spoken more than a little about how poorly the Unemployment system, at least in Arizona, works. I won’t spend any more time on it here, except to say it’s unwise to commit your survival to it. It’s singularly unreliable.
2. People must spend money for the economy to function. If no one has any money, no one can buy the goods and services that keep money flowing through the economy. If a business is able to remain open, that business needs customers. Those customers must have money to spend. Without a job, that money is likely hard to find. One cannot spend what one does not have.
3. Business owners require money to stay open. If the business can’t sell its good or services, it must still meet its overhead or close. A closed business results in job losses. The job losses result in less money to spend. Less money to spend results in more businesses, that did manage to function during a pandemic, closing. This results in more job losses… and so on and so on…

How do we solve these problems? I’m going to offer some possible solutions. Again, I invite you to offer alternative solutions if you have them. That phone number, again, is (480) 331–9822.

1. Give everyone… and by this, let’s be clear, I mean all Americans (if it were up to me I would say everyone on Earth, but I’m willing to go one step at a time)… enough money to survive. A Universal Basic Income would allow people to stay home when jobs can’t be found to pay them. It would slow the spread of the pandemic by allowing more businesses to stay closed until they can safely open. It would relieve businesses of the need to meet payroll while they’re closed. It would eliminate the need for means testing that rarely works anyway. It gets money to people who most need it as quickly as possible.
2. Encourage online shopping. Some businesses are not yet equipped for this model. We invest money in helping them get set up that way. We do most of our grocery shopping with curbside pickup or delivery. We ensure that we continue to have a properly functioning Post Office, whose importance increases every day of the pandemic. We find the means to provide internet access for everyone. This helps both with businesses and education. It helps consumers and parents. It helps, in fact, everyone.
3. Invest in Small Businesses. This means we support them in their efforts to adapt to the new economy. It means we ensure people have the money to spend to keep the businesses at least able to cover their expenses, if not profitable. Help them to help themselves.

Question #3:

What is necessary to end the unrest?

This question is the last of the three I believe we would all like to answer. And it unmasks some significant social problems in our culture.

1. Significant numbers of people feel marginalized, ignored, and abused. Many of us are ignored. Many of us are simply hidden from view by a world that is embarrassed we exist. This ever growing population is rising and demanding attention. We’re tired of waiting to be recognized.
2. Significant portions of the population feel threatened. We fear losing power that has traditionally been ours. We feel as though we are being stripped of our birth rights. We strongly object to the violence that arises within the protests.
3. The struggle for who will control our lives is being played out in technicolor 3D and surround sound. Everyone is asking for control of their own lives, often at the cost of others giving them control of lives that are not theirs to control. How much government should we have? How much are we morally required to help one another? How much are we legally required to do so? Why is there often a mismatch?

What are the solutions to these problems? Once more unto the breach, dear friends. I’ll give you some of mine. You contribute yours. We’ll try to find solutions together. Once again, call me at (480) 331–9822 to offer your answers.

1. Invite leaders from all sides of the protests to a Virtual Town Hall in which they can present their demands to the leaders who can actually create the changes. All sides are heard, politely and respectfully, one at a time. A non partisan moderator keeps the conversation focused on solutions and keeps fallacious arguments and name calling out of the discourse. The demands are, to the greatest degree possible, met, in real time for everyone to see and hear.
2. Acknowledge the need for safety. It’s near the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy. If we can’t meet those needs for everyone, we have no business calling ourselves a civilization. At the same time, recognize that power is seldom passed peacefully. Accept that power must be shared, and that it’s not pie. When the protests end, the violence that tends to accompany them will end as well. Let’s pay attention to the fact that violence, so far, has done little to reduce violence.
3. Give power to the largest and most diverse set of people possible. Let’s do what democracy was always supposed to do: give everyone a real voice in the discussion. Remove money from politics to avoid giving an unfair advantage to those who have more of it. They have plenty of advantages already. Give all Americans $100 to donate to any political cause or candidate they choose. Andrew Yang called this idea Democracy Dollars. Make other contributions illegal. Create a viable third party that increases the choices given to voters.

Wait a minute! Every single one of your ideas cost money. Where are you getting the funding?

We just printed trillions, with a “t”, of dollars and spent most of it on the wealthy. Print some for the rest of us, and move on.

Let’s seek compromises between friends instead of crushing the enemy. Let’s realize that, until war is declared, there is no enemy. There are just those whose ideas differ from ours.

I don’t know that my answers are right. I don’t have any interest in any labels that might be applied to them. Are they Republican or Democratic? Socialist or Capitalist? Pastafarian or Catholic? Marxist? Communist? Elitist? Idealistic? Brilliant? Stupid? I. Don’t. Care.

I’m interested in finding, within diverse ideas whose origins are left out of the discussion as mud in the water, solutions to the problems we all share.