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Why Is It We Don’t Talk or Write About the Things That Matter?

Take climate change for an instance. I’ve written about that a bit, but we ought to be out in the streets, raging about our comprehensive governmental unwillingness to do a damn thing, while California alternatively burns down or slides away in floods. This is not ‘a problem to be solved when we get around to it,’ the seas are rising and whole species are disappearing from the earth every day.

Assisted suicide is a no-no and my mother, dad and brother all died quite unnecessarily painful deaths and extended suffering at the end of their lives. Our individual decline and death is off the discussion, as if it will not eventually show up at the door. But it will and then we will be the victims without choice. So we pretend it isn’t an issue and the problem gets shut away in the dark closet of our elsewhere issues.

We all have that closet, the place we never go.

In our business life, be that at an office or more and more often checking in from home, we never seem to complain about the time wasted in meetings about having more meetings. Get on with it, for god’s sake someone make a decision and cut out all this committee crap. Remember, the camel was a horse designed by a committee. Individuals have talent.

Why not allow them to use it and take the time (and money) saved to fly everyone to Bermuda when winter becomes unbearable? If not that, then having recognized that time is money (in both our private and business lives), take the money saved and bump everyone’s pay packet a bit.

What all of these habitual and unresolved problems have in common is that they maintain a weird sort of force-field that keeps us from putting the broom, with which we sweep discomfort under the rug, in the corner and solving them. We know what to do about the rich not paying their way, the poor never having a chance at a more normal life, our out-of-control gun culture and our unwillingness to sit down with those who have different opinions. We sit down, we write, we discuss, we hear and understand.

Life is a kitchen table. Pour a cup of coffee, have a doughnut and solve it.

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