Common Ground

There are so many different people with different beliefs and values all over the place. Our biggest challenge is to move beyond, "You have your head up your ass and your shit needs to be stamped out at all costs," to "Let's figure out how to live together and provide for those we care for despite our differences." Of course, all sides would have to acknowledge that.

Really, everybody should have access to what should be the basics of life...food, housing, education, and decent medical care at a minimum, as long as there are the resources to keep that up (and if there aren't the resources to keep that up we are in really deep trouble). Keeping up the fight for that should be a constant thing. But there seem to be so many people who fight back against that every time it is brought up. Everybody can (and will) have their own definition of who they care for...some will be more expansive than others.

Hopefully we could reach a minimum ground that everybody could agree on, and then we can keep trying to get more things that we believe in, while acknowledging that others will believe differently and that they are not necessarily enemies that need to be vanquished because of it. But has human nature become too deformed to even get to that point? When we look at seemingly intractable conflicts...Israelis vs. Palestinians, for example, neither side is willing to reach a minimum common ground and build upon it from there because they distrust the other side too much, and a mentality gets built up that the other side just needs to be wiped out because they are too unreasonable.

Fiscal Cliff?

• People are apprehensive about the "fiscal cliff."  Actually, we tumbled off the fiscal cliff in the 1980s, head over heels, limbs akimbo. We're still trying to mend our broken bones and climb back up.