Who is RIGHT?
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| Who is right, who
is wrong? Sometimes that is not the question that really needs to be asked. I remember when I was a child and all us poor people had in our homes were dirt floors. Especially when you have to haul water on your shoulder for several miles, dirt floors are kept clean in a much different way than floors of wood are. Consequently when these two cultures met, rich people soon thought that they had to educate us poor people in how to keep wooden floors correctly cleanly. "This is how you use a broom to sweep a wooden floor"; and yes, the two methodologies were - and are - totally different even though the broom used in one operation is basically identical to the broom used in the other one. |
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| Years later I could look
back and see that who was right and who was wrong was the
wrong question to be asking. The real decision should have
been "How can these people that are sweeping dirt floors
help us learn how to sweep our wooden floors right?" This approach was especially true when our combined cultures was introduced to a culture where homes came with floors decorated with carpets, deep pile carpets. Cleaning deep pile carpets required the use of vacuum cleaners, we were told. We were quickly told that sweeping carpets with a broom was ALL wrong, and they demonstrated with a broom how sweeping simply would not work. Us poor people accepted this incontrovertible truth and learned how to use a vacuum cleaner in the approved fashion by our richer neighbors. Interestingly enough, when I went to a sacred temple on a cleaning expedition I was told that I would have to relearn how to use a vacuum cleaner. "You don't PUSH a vacuum cleaner through a temple room, you PULL a vacuum cleaner through a temple room." "What difference does it make?" I asked in a startled whisper. If this had been a rich guy/poor guy situation then I would have simply been told to do it "this way" or else. But in a temple situation, rich and poor are exactly alike, both equal before the bar of salvation. Therefore my instructor gently - and kindly - demonstrated the benefits that are achieved by pulling a vacuum cleaner after you against the benefits of pushing a vacuum cleaner ahead of you. It was an "Aha!" moment of vast significance, especially in a sacred temple setting, but I could also see that I needed to mend my ways when vacuuming our carpets at home. Forever afterwards it was, pull, pull, pull the vacuum cleaner after me as I cleaned carpets at home. So here I am in one lifetime, raised all the way up on the plateaus of civilization from living in a home with dirt floors -- to living in a home with deep, plush, pile carpets. The younger generation would say "Ah, what a vast improvement carpets are," but quite frankly, there are times when I would prefer living with a dirt floor again. You hardly ever saw a dirt floor stained with a splash of fingernail polish, for example. One drawback to living with deep pile carpets in our homes becomes apparent when an old man (like me) is mowing a yard too big for him. When the humidity is suffering with triple digit inflation I need to drink water more frequently and to expel it more often as well. Taking my shoes off at the door way a dozen times an hour quickly gets old and before the day is out I "forget" to take my shoes off at the door. Consequently, streams of grass clippings appeared to be trailing me from one destination in our home to another. I headed for the vacuum cleaner, but paused to reflect. Are vacuum cleaners always the right methodology for cleaning carpets? Perhaps not! Therefore, I picked up the broom and began sweeping the grass clippings towards the doorway. Whoa, or maybe I meant "Woe!" because, No, my sweeping fresh green grass over the carpet was making a bigger mess than I had started with. Therefore I put the broom away and again started to retrieve the vacuum cleaner. Along the way I remembered the OLD way of sweeping that one must use for sweeping dirt floors instead of wooden floors. Remembering the mess I had already made with the broom it was with some trepidation that I picked up the broom once more and began sweeping, but as the old muscle patterns came into play again it was quickly apparent that when faced with grass clippings, sweeping the floor with a broom in the old way was achieving results that are far superior to the intermediate manner of using a broom -- and to using the vacuum cleaner methodology as well. Thus it turns out that from knowing how to take care of a dirt floor one knows how to combine those methodologies to really achieve a good carpet cleaning. Because the vacuum is not always the best way of getting even a carpet clean, and if one knows how to take care of a dirt floor then these two methodologies meld together; or- to make this even more plain; by melding a portion from each of these three methodologies together we'll get a carpet really clean even when fresh grass clippings have been strewn in tattle-tale trails across it. ** As a web master with thousands and thousands of interlocking pages spread throughout four major web sites to maintain I have developed an almost innumerable sequence of bad connections to eliminate. These were created through a series of bad decisions compounded by my software. My expensive software neatly identifies each of these bad connections, and it offers to repair them again, for sure this time. Inevitably, the repair produces a greater number of results that are infinitely worse than the original problem. Therefore I began repairing the connections manually, one at a time starting from the top and proceeding to the bottom -- even as the software already has them listed for me. Well, any problem that a computer can't fix will require a significant patch of time to unweave and interweave to the right destination. It soon became apparent that repairing my broken connections, one at a time would take me forever. Fresh from my solution for sweeping the carpet I asked myself: "But is one-at-a-time from the top down the only real solution?" Sure. If I could just let the computer do it then yes - the one-at-a-time and in sequence pattern would be the right solution simply because the computer is so fast that it doesn't matter if it takes a few seconds longer to do it the wrong way. The computer gets them all, so it does not matter how many extra nanoseconds are involved. But -- because the computer can not repair these connections between my four primary web sites and my brain is the one engaged to sort out and fix those connections manually, then it is of vast significance in which order I correct those connections. What the computer could repair in a few nanoseconds - if it could - will take me weeks, if not more than a month of intense, frustrating labor. Such is my financial situation that I cannot continue losing money for a month, and therefore I felt compelled to rearrange the criteria by which my list of broken corrections are approached. For example, what I want to do is fix those connections in a sequence most important to my customers. Since it requires an investment 9 times higher to acquire a new customer than to keep an old one I prefer to keep my old customers happy. Customers seldom tell the vendor when they are frustrated and unhappy; they tell their friends, and they tell ALL of their friends. They will, in fact, write their displeasure down on their wall for all their friends to see, pick up, and distribute to their friends. Ripples of displeasure like that should be nipped in the bud - as Barney used to say. Therefore, I set about monitoring how many bad connections my old customers were finding. Then I set about first fixing the ones that impacts them most often. I believe this course will provide me more time to do the fixing of the minor connections in the one-at-a-time sequence the computer would have me to do. In recounting this situation it is my intent to illustrate a method of applying this type of ratiocination to some of the basic problems facing our nation's plentiful supply of social concerns at this time. For example, we have the question of which is the best fuel to be using in our road vehicles. Contenders for the "right solution" are: steam power, gasoline, propane, natural gas, diesel, or perhaps in the future even nuclear power, water power or wind power may become the right fuel solution for our vehicles. Who knows, it might well be more appropriate to consider the possibility that instead of letting each vehicle have a motor to propel it that there will be just one motor to provide power for all of the vehicles in each city. Each vehicle would be supplied with a sufficient propelling force when it was needed, and if we visualize the old streetcars picking up energy from an overhead wire as they went along then our minds could approach this distribution with more clarity. After tangling with the fresh grass clippings this morning, my thought is that perhaps there will be an intelligent mangling of some these approaches that I have mentioned. Going back to when I was a child again, there were two smart kids that couldn't afford to buy a sufficient amount of gasoline to reach all their desired destinations. Kerosene was much cheaper back then, but how do you run a car on kerosene? The obvious answer was that you couldn't. But these two boys decided that they wanted to anyway, so they devised a valve that would let them gradually switch from using gasoline to kerosene. Then they would run the cold-motored car on gas until it warmed up, and then they would gradually switch over to kerosene and they quickly reached a point where the car ran easily and effectively on kerosene. 10, 15-20 years later, the scientists developing jets used the same principle, one fuel to get the new kind of planes off the ground in a roaring blast of hot fumes, and the other fuel to maintain their cruise fuel-efficiently in the air. Similarly, right now we have a President in the Oval Office that is making strategic decisions that our Republican friends are terrified by. At the same time, many of our Democrat friends are electrified by those very same decisions. So the rest of us voters have decided that we must determine who is right who's wrong. But, perhaps giving one of those parties a lump sum of victory is not the right approach. Perhaps the question should be shifted by first examining the criteria of the goal that both parties want to reach. It usually happens that both parties want the same results, but one wants to use the broom, and the other wants to use the vacuum cleaner, so to speak. If the United States modeled its approach to its problems in accordance with the intentions and guidance of our Founding Fathers as incorporated in our Constitution then America should be patently great in absorbing ideas from all sides so it could reach out with a one-in-purpose desire to accomplish a nationally desired result. But history has taught us that rather than working with the higher law in mind, both parties are guilty of using the perverted purpose of keeping restive relatives in power and in powerful positions. Then those decisions are "justified" or explained in such a manner that the American people knuckle under and accept them with only muted mumblings.
If the American people can consistently set goals together, and both parties sit down in separate conference to shift and sift out what it can do to help the nation get there then we would have an approach that produces much better results. Let each party look at what the other party feels that it can do to get there and then if we have a President with enough vision to see the end from the beginning s/he could determine if there is a way to intermingle these two disciplines to reach the goals set by the voters -- and not act the criteria of what will work best to keep his own party in power. Who is right? Who is wrong? We must not come back to that -- not in our national politics and not in our family politics either. The real answer is to forget trying to affix blame on somebody and just ask another question: "Who can help, and what can we do?" |
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