“Does this make me look fat?” How many of us have heard someone say this or perhaps we’ve uttered it ourselves? The real hard question that should be asked when looking in the mirror is, “Am I overweight?” If so, “why?” “What am I going to do about it?” I know that I have certainly been guilty of falling into the trap of not being willing to ask the hard questions about myself and my life from time to time. But the fact is, in general, the most important part of solving a problem is to ask the right questions and deal with reality rather than a fantasy world conjured up in our minds.
I read something in the paper yesterday morning that reinforced my belief that it’s going to be very difficult to solve some of the biggest problems facing this country because we, as a society, often refuse to ask the right questions. I will be the first to admit that asking the hard questions is often uncomfortable because many times the answers either don’t agree with our preconceived notions or just plain force us to look at ourselves in a way that we don’t like. But failing to ask those questions will not allow us to solve the problems, either personally or as a society.
Republican legislators in Oklahoma and in other areas of the country are pushing legislation to stop protestors from blocking roads and proposing increased penalties for demonstrators who run onto highways and LEGAL IMMUNITY FOR DRIVERS WHO HIT THEM. This stems from the Black Lives Matter protests that occurred las year. Think about that a minute. If protestors are on a road and a car plows into them, the driver will have immunity. One can only imagine the carnage that could ensue. Of course, there will be those that agree that if protestors are in the way, they deserve whatever is coming to them, including getting run over by a car because the driver can do so with impunity.
The reason that this type of legislation will create way more problems than it solves is simply because the people behind it refuse to ask the right questions. The question is not, “How can we stop people from protesting and blocking roads?”. The question is, “Why are the people protesting to begin with? Passing a law to increase penalties for protestors and make it essentially ‘open season’ for drivers will only exacerbate the underlying problem.
The Black Lives Matter protests were in response to the continued, and seemingly unending, brutality and senseless deaths of people of color at the hands of police across the country. That is the problem that needs to be addressed. The problem is one of systemic racism and passing laws allowing drivers to run over protestors with impunity will not only not solve the problem, it will make it worse. Just what do you think will happen if there are some BLM protestors peacefully blocking a road somewhere and some overzealous white person runs over and kills or injures some of those protestors? Talk about pouring gas on a fire. The thinking behind these proposed laws is just mind-boggling.
Another prime example in the news these days is the debacle in Texas. The blame game started almost immediately and, given the public statements from the governor on down it doesn’t seem likely that the public officials in Texas will be very interested in asking the hard questions as to why this infrastructure meltdown really occurred and what actions need to be taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Rather than asking the hard self-reflecting questions like, “Was it smart to not tie the energy system in Texas into the national grid?” “Given that there are wind turbines operating in much harsher environments than Texas (Montana for example), did we do enough to winterize our turbines?” “Since wind turbines only account for a fraction of Texas’ energy output, what happened to the rest of the infrastructure based on fossil fuel?” “Given that climate scientists have been predicting things like this for years, did we take adequate steps to be prepared?” “What realistic steps do we need to take now to be prepared for a recurrence?”1
Of course, the best recent example is the whole presidential election fiasco. Rather than Republicans sitting back and asking, “Why didn’t more people vote for our candidate?”, they went down the rabbit hole of voter fraud and rigged elections. And now, in many of the states they lost, the ‘solution’ is to implement laws restricting voter access for the next election. Restricting voter access will not increase the number of people who will vote for their candidate. The demographics of the country will continue to work against this strategy. If the Republicans (and the Democrats as well) really want to increase the long-term viability of the party, they need to ask the right questions and develop strategies to solve those problems.
The only way that hard problems are going to get solved is for all of us, but most of all, our political leaders to be able to ask the hard questions. Failure to do that is just continuing to more lipstick on the pig. And sooner or later we’re going to run out of lipstick!
How can they be the Far-Right when they are far wrong by always asking the wrong questions?