CARLTON FLETCHER: Some solutions are really quite simple

If I promised you the moon and the stars would you believe me?

— Alan Parsons Project

You hear from people in this business, when you’re willing to express opinions — many of them unpopular — and most of the time what you hear is people telling you that you’re stupid or you’re this or you’re that … simply because they don’t agree with you.

That’s OK. If I were being honest, I’d probably say I’m stupid or this or that, too. That’s the way I feel a lot of the time when I read something from a partisan apologist like a Michael Reagan or a Eugene Robinson, people whose every opinion is based on opposing rather than espousing.

But every now and then you hear from someone who may not necessarily agree with what you’ve written, but they offer a reasonable response, one that can be thought-provoking or even mind-changing. I heard from one such person the other day in response to a column I wrote, and I keep coming back to the thing this person — who I know, by the way, and have a great deal of respect for — said.

We exchange pleasantries from time to time, comment on this issue or that, but always with a sense of curiosity as opposed to enmity. I’ve come to value his comments very deeply. This is what he wrote:

Good column. Now when are you going to start writing about solutions instead of stating the obvious?

How do you respond to something like that? How do you explain that for many people, any suggestion I make is going to be perceived as coming from a particular, partisan point of view? How do you try and rationalize with people who, when they don’t agree with a personal assessment, break out their litany of names to call you, no matter that you have no interest in espousing any one person’s or any one political party’s ideology?

But there those words were, haunting me … when are you going to start writing about solutions instead of stating the obvious … taunting me to the core of my existence.

So I decided to take my wizened friend up on his challenge. I decided to offer simple solutions that, while they may be rejected because they don’t follow any political party or group’s marching orders, they’re what I think might help.

The most recent problem I mentioned was this idea of following the dictates of an individual or a party without vetting in the least the feasibility of the individual’s or group’s rationale for making such dictates. How does one, for instance, go all-in in support of a border wall without looking at the rationale, cost, feasibility and purpose of such a structure?

Sure, after they’re fed bits of (often false) information by the politician and his yes-men or the “journalists” whose partisanship has robbed them of their objectivity, and thus their credibility, these followers regurgitate those bits as if they are fact. But along with bits of truth — yes, there is a potential immigration crisis brewing in a country that exports drugs that are killing and weakening tens of thousands of Americans on a weekly basis, drugs, it should be noted, for which we provide the demand — but these phony stories of murdering mobs sparking an invasion are so far-fetched it’s always amazing when the true believers bring them up at all, much less as accepted truth.

And are young people so caught up in their social media devices that they don’t even bother to look at the credibility of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before they decide she has all the answers and it’s time to ditch a way of life that has made us the most powerful and advanced nation in the history of the world in favor of a system that rewards not the hard work of individuals but the people who are little more than a drain on society?

The solution to this kind of blind loyalty should be obvious: Think for yourself. Quit buying any load of hooey that a politician whose only interest is of the “self” variety dishes out and call bull on it when it doesn’t pass the smell test. (Space Force, anyone?) Stop allowing politicians to convince you that their popularity and their egos are what matter, that they must have your support to get a “win” or the other side will gain ground.

History has shown that people who follow a tyrant, an Adolf Hitler or an Idi Amin, are people who accepted their words — horrifying as they were — as what’s best simply because it was the easy thing to do.

Here’s a solution that we all can embrace: Get up off your lazy ass, do a little investigating into all these promises being made, and when something looks, sounds or feels too good to be true, remember that 99 percent of the time it is.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.