It’s too hard! It’s too hard!

Healthcare reform is rife with difficult problems. But not impossible problems.

While many politicians and media types are running about throwing dirt in the air screaming, “It’s too complicated! It’s too difficult!” the New York Times yesterday described what’s in the bills currently being considered in congress and I actually understood them.

Of course, those trying to scare off healthcare reform are very good at fear and confusion.

One of the stock fears is that rickety old meme: we must never raise taxes (another subject) because, despite extraordinary examples to the contrary, the government always does things badly while the private sector does them much better.

I’m a preacher’s kid. I spent half my life hiding out in the non-profit world: my father worked there and I started out there. Until I got my first secular job, I projected all sorts of wisdom and effectiveness onto corporate people. (Of course, when you spend half your life in deadly dull church committee meetings, it’s easy to think that someone, somewhere must be more effective than this.)

It didn’t take long after my emergence from the cloister to have my faith in the effectiveness of the corporate world utterly eradicated. I was stunned by the self-destructive instincts of the first big company I worked for. The way they splashed around money and wasted time and creative energy was appalling.

Watching the recent meltdown of supposedly smart companies, I find the belief that the private sector is always the right answer laughable.

Plus, it seems to me one of government’s unique advantages is its ability to occasionally make choices that benefit those lest able to benefit themselves.

Corporations, no matter how many melodic commercials they roll out on public television, are by their very nature inhuman. They’re built to make money and protect themselves. I don’t blame them for that. That’s why they were created. It’s takes real dedication for them to care about you and me when that's unprofitable.

So healthcare reform is hard because it's complex and it threatens moneymaking businesses — and we all depend on moneymaking businesses. But it’s not impossible.

Is anyone in the news business?

Last week reminded me that, even during a national crisis, the news media goes for the heat, not the light.

That’s no great insight.

But, I was set off by the specials about Walter Cronkite quickly followed by the uproar over President Obama’s comments about the arrest of Harvard African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

About 20 years ago I was put on a discussion panel about the news media (totally sans credentials) simply because I had written a letter to the editor that said, in essence, way back when TV news started running teasers about what they were going to tell us later, they weren’t really in the news business anymore.

If you come on the air and say, “Somebody died, but we’re not going to tell who it was until 10 pm” — when you have live air and know the news, but won’t report it — what you’re doing for a living has changed.

What can I say? I was brought up a news purist.

That’s because Walter Cronkite, along with Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and others, were in the news business.

On his latest HBO show, Bill Maher reminded me that news used to be a loss-leader. It was produced as a matter of personal pride and civic duty. No one's in that business anymore.

Treat them like a cat

People are complicated. Relationships are complicated. I want to be helpful and caring, but there are times when it’s hard to know how involved to get with some folks.

There’s a phrase my wife and I use to summarize our approach to certain people. We say, “treat them like a cat”.

We’ve had cats all our lives. Some of them like to talk at you — they mew and yowl and pace around as if something important is being said.

It’s fun to jump into the conversation with them. You nod and act interested because it seems important to the cat: “Oh yah?” “Is that right?” “Uh-hah.” “Well that may be.” You hold up your end of the conversation, and it makes them happy. But you’re not really emotionally involved because … it’s a cat.

At certain times, that’s good strategy with people. Be polite. Stay in the conversation, but don’t become part of their turmoil.

“Treat them like a cat” developed during our child-raising years, one of the strategies we stumbled on trying to maintain our mental balance.

We have three great children, now in their 30s. But, growing up, there were times when they were going through stuff that either: 

- We couldn’t effect — they were going to do what they were going to do, and we knew it.

- Or there was something difficult they needed do and more talk wouldn’t help. They needed to act.

As parents, you’re always emotionally involved — it’s wired in. Then you discover that there are times when staying involved leaves you crazy and them no better off. It’s dysfunctional. It may make you feel valuable, but it’s no help to add your upset to their upset.

So “treat them like a cat” became a shorthand we understood, an easy-to-grasp metaphor for “be kind and loving, but the best thing to do right now is make sure you don’t make their problem into your problem.”

My wife and I will be reporting on our day and one of us will say, “I decided to treat them like a cat.” Or we'll be talking with someone about a troubling relationship and we’ll suggest, “You might want to try treating them like a cat.”

It’s not the only answer, but it may help.

Not normal

Monday morning.

In today’s newspaper — I’ve got to have a newspaper every morning to feel normal — it says that more people are now committing suicide on Wednesdays than on Mondays. It's a story, I guess, because Mondays has always been number one for surfacing neuroses.

It’s normal to feel depressed on Monday, right?

Depends on what you mean by normal.

It’s not hard to imagine what’s normal for the only child of a Baptist minister from Des Moines whose values were formed in the middle of the 1950s. All I have to do is roll out of bed in the morning, any morning, to feel like someone’s probably already disappointed in me for not being as good as I should be.

Normal is like sprinkling seasoning on food to make it taste “right". So fear has been one of my normal ways of seasoning reality. I can see myself sprinkling a little of it onto all sorts of happy situations to make them feel “normal.”

And that’s crazy.

Thank goodness, that’s not all that’s normal for me. There are many other ways I bend reality to make it more of what I’m used to.

Sociologists and psychologists tell us normal is an artificial pattern we impose on the quirkiness of humanity to give us some safe places to stand.

I saw an outstanding new musical in New York a couple of weeks ago called Next to Normal. It suggested that going for normal can keep you crazy, that next to normal is better. That sounds right to me.

Small wars

This blog’s name is a warning label; generalizations are never true in a fullest sense of the word. Hopefully, they catch enough of the plate (watch out, baseball metaphor) to be of some value.

Back in college, when I had a paper due Monday morning, I’d sit down at my typewriter Sunday night (you may have heard of typewriters) and write what I called a Billy Graham special. I’d wave my arms a lot and try to sell passionate generalizations as well-researched insight.

Ok, so here’s one of those:  

We shouldn’t allow any more little wars.

Watching the violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, I heard someone say that wars like Viet Nam and Iraq II (two) would never be allowed to dribble on, draining resources, thousands of lives and large chunks of moral energy, if they required a total national commitment like World War II.

I believe that.

When only a few of us have skin in the game—what a cruel phrase, in this situation—it’s too easy to prolong the game.

If it’s mostly the lest powerful who are putting their loved ones’ lives on the line, if we can contract out a good portion of the killing and mayhem, if the devastation can actually begin to get boring, slip out of the big print and onto page two or three, become background noise—I’m now waving my arms—we shouldn’t be going to those kinds of wars.

What do you do with a regional conflict? What about a small time tyrant who's got to be stopped? Good questions. But whatever the answers, it should cost all of us something important, so we think more carefully, watch more closely and act more responsibly.

There is no such thing as minor surgery when it’s happening to you. 

There's intimacy. Then there's sex.

I’m back from a long July 4th weekend in New York. We had a great time seeing shows and soaking up the energy of the city.

While I was away, South Carolina Governor Mark Sandford’s public meltdown continued only to be overrun by Michael Jackson’s death and Sarah Palin’s ... well ... what was that?

There was one piece of the Sandford story that caught my eye, probably caught yours too.

Heaping injury on insult, he first divulged a history of liaisons with other women, then, as if it somehow made it all o.k., pleaded that he'd never actually “crossed the line” with any of them. Incredible.

He meant sexual intimacy, of course. But he surely knows he crossed an infinitely more important line than sexuality intimacy. He thoughtlessly squandered his emotional intimacy.

Anyone who’s been married or in a committed relationship knows the subtle interaction between sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy. You can have sex without coming close to touching each other. And you don’t have to be in a relationship long to notice:
- The days when you’re emotionally available to each other and the ones when you’re not.
- The times you choose to hang on to your emotional distance -- for any number of reasons.
- How emotional distance can become a habit, and the impact if you let it continue too long.

Start playing fast and loose with emotional intimacy, overlooking it in your primary relationship or scattering it around like Sandford and ... well ... scattering your seed becomes a secondary issue.