By Marty Richman
You’re going to find this story hard to believe, but it’s
true.
You’re going to find this story hard to believe, but it’s true. Yesterday I received a “survey” from a major political party in the mail. It doesn’t matter which party; they both use similar, if not identical, campaigns. With only 15 multiple-choice questions, this survey was supposed to determine how I would solve the major issues of our time. I couldn’t wait to get started.
First, a little background: This wasn’t just any old survey, this was a “personalized” survey just for me because, they said, I was an “important party leader.” I was flattered – that is until I realized the personalized survey had parts of my name wrong and that I was not a member, much less a leader, of the party. Getting a “personalized” anything with parts of your name wrong is a bummer, but being incorrectly tapped as a party leader or even party member is the real eye-opener.
Either the party leadership has many vacancies or they are sending these personalized “party leader surveys” to almost everyone. What do you think?
Still, I did not want to miss this opportunity so I decided to complete the survey and I hope they never discover that I’m not really a party leader, or even a party member. Who knows what complex election laws that decision might violate and how many years in the hoosegow I’d be facing if I were ever found out? I was literally shaking as I continued my criminal actions, but you don’t get a chance to solve the major issues of our time every day, no sir.
I looked for a subject I knew something about as a place to start and immediately spied a good candidate at question No. 2, what to do about Social Security. As a party leader, I was given three choices on ways to fix Social Security; I assume that non-leaders only got one or two choices. I felt sorry for them; three choices gives you real flexibility. The three choices boiled down to these: 1) guarantee everything for everyone forever (no details), 2) change it ‘our’ way to make it wonderful (no details), or 3) ruin it completely by changing it ‘their’ way (no details). Those were not easy choices.
The longest of the actual pre-printed answers among the three consisted of 14 words and the shortest one was seven words. If you removed the words, “to, for, their, Social Security” and “are” from the longest answer, you were left with only seven significant words. So, this survey demanded I explain how to fix Social Security’s problems in only seven words.
Social Security’s problems are so complex that you could take 250 economists, actuaries, government officials, and public-policy wonks and lock them in a room for a year (a good idea by itself) and they would just be getting started. However, I’m being forced to choose between 1) guarantee everything for everyone (no details), 2) change it our way to make it wonderful (no details), or 3) ruin it completely by changing it their way (no details). I guess the survey’s sponsors never heard the saying that “every complex problem has a simple, easy to implement solution that is almost always wrong.” The rest of the survey went on in the same way. Do you want to solve the energy and environment issue? Pick seven significant words.
Recently Scientific American magazine published a special edition with board proposals on how America could achieve energy independence with environmental safety in perhaps 50 years. It was filled with articles and options, costs and benefits, risks and rewards. In other words, it was like the issue itself, complex. In real life, no one can explain what to do about Social Security or the energy-environment cycle in just seven words. The politicians must know that, so what was the point of the survey?
Eventually I got to the point, the only point, it was the last item, question No. 15: Will you send us some money to make it all happen? No, no I won’t. We the people have set the standard, and the standard is low. For far too many ideology has become the single most important issue on our political shopping list, so ideology is what the politicians of both sides give us, seven-word solutions designed to close your mind and open your wallet. As with all consumer choices, in politics you get what you are willing to accept.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident. He can be reached at [email protected]
