Always the bigger picture (#2046)

Most folks are smart enough to know that if something is good then it should be policy and if it is not good then it shouldn't be. We are not perfect here in America, actually far from it, but in the end we do try to get our policy right. Sometimes it takes us doing things the wrong way in order to find out the right way. The problem with that is the damage done in the meantime and surely we are more enlightened than to be practicing trial and error when a little bit of complex thinking will save us the harm we suffer in our quest for a better society. The best place to start in our rationalizing is to conclude whether the policy has harm. Our base line is equality, justice and opportunity. If we maintain the dignity of those principles in our policy then we have gotten it right. If not, then we need to work harder and more thoughtfully on our attempted policy. Too often, in our current society, there is some harm in most policy and the trick is to reduce/eliminate the harm wherever it occurs, regardless of the policy's complexity, We do not scrap a policy that is effective in most to all cases just because it has flaws in it that can be offset by adjusting rules that eliminate either one or any combination thereof of inequality, injustice or lack of opportunity. In other words, let us not throw the baby out with the bath water. Yet we must also not allow deficiencies in policy to proceed without addressing the solutions to those deficiencies. The focus must be on the whole policy and not just an ulterior motive driven one that destroys the policy as a tactic. There are those who would have us have no policy that affects certain groupings of our population and we as a society must not allow the ones who think that democratic ideals are secondary to their own ambitions to destroy what good may come from a policy. This is why we must always keep our focus on what we are trying to accomplish for our society within the bounds of democracy and know that there are those out there who are just as driven to destroy our society if it benefits their ambition.