Most of you probably know this one: A man is wandering around under a street light looking down at the ground. Another man comes up to him, and asks, "What's going on?" The first man says, "I lost my car keys, and I'm looking for them." The second man says, "Here, let me help you. Where did you lose them?" The first man points up the up the street a bit, "Over there," he says. The second man looks at him, puzzled. "But, if you lost your keys over there, why are you looking for them here?" he asks. The First man scoffs at him," It's dark over there. Can't see a thing. The light's much better over here."
I first read this in a book of Sufi stories by Idries Shah. Supposedly, it's ancient, much, much older than cars and modern street lamps. And I believe it. It speaks to an incredibly common foible: look for the solution that's easy to see, comfortable to look for, regardless of whether it relates to the problem. I thought of that story last weekend, as Vastleft did his best to hijack a comment thread in a global warming diary to once again bash Open Left for not fanatically supporting single-payer--even though all of us feel that it's the only practicable solution in the long run. It began with this comment by selise:
"not politically feasible" and "
The real problem, of course, is that--just like with health care reform--there's way too much money being made and to be made by those who are causing the problem in the first place. So actual solutions are not really wanted--so much so that they are simply dismissed as "not politically feasible."
i love this quote and plan to use it frequently, but i'm also reminded of something you, paul, wrote in your previous post:
...civility is not the answer. Civility would be just fine, if accountability were for the wealthy and powerful and not just exclusively for the rest of us, along with more than our fair share of blame.
Rather than civilly adjusting our public expenditures to the private penury of the post-1973 world, we should be quite rudely fighting to restore--and even improve upon--the broad prosperity of the pre-1973 era. Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive." Nothing less than that deserves to be "justice." Nothing less than that deserves to be "humane." Nothing less than that should be our bottom line.
these two quotes and what i think you are saying we need to do, seem, at least to me, directly at odds with what we are actually doing here... what i'm referring to is the recent banning of people who were insufficiently civil in demandinng a fight for just and humane healthcare.
how can you write:
Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive."
and then not defend the people who were saying EXACTLY that?
There's a big difference between disrupting your true enemies and disrupting those who would be your allies, if only you could stop demonizing them.
In this case, "those who would be your allies" refers specifically to other single-payer supporters who see that goal as something that--unfortunately--we can only achieve in stages. But the principle expressed is far broader than that.
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