![\"2000\"](\"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/2000-300x216.jpg\" "\\"2000\\"")
Since this is the time of year when we indulge in this kind of stuff I\u2019m going to join the fray. We are now ten years into the 21st Century (and the 3rd Millennium of the \u201cCommon Era\u201d). As a person who has always been a big sci-fi fan and focused on the future, my anticipation of the \u201c21st Century\u201d (through the last forty years of the 20th) was always filled with thoughts of great forward-looking human achievements and a human race focused positively on the future and leaving behind much of the crap from the past. I must say I was disappointed as things unfolded in 2000 with Bush\u2019s election, the events of 9\/11\/2001 soon after that, and much of what\u2019s transpired in reaction to those events since.\n
\nSo some of you are probably familiar with the exercise of writing things down that you are ready to be done with on a piece of paper, which you call out and then ritually burn. It is certainly one of the provocative rituals that my Unitarian-Universalist congregation practices. So in a personal version of that exercise, here are some things from these last ten (much anticipated, certainly by me) years that I\u2019d like to call out, burn, and be done with…
\n
\nFirst of all, I\u2019m ready to be done with framing our country in a perpetual state of war with an elusive enemy that is seemingly undefeatable. I think it is corrosive to our culture to have to keep reiterating (for domestic political purposes if nothing else) that we are at \u201cwar\u201d with \u201cjihadists\u201d or \u201cterrorists\u201d with all the martial vigilance this implies.
\n
\nMaybe as our Republican comrades keep reminding us, it is na\u00efve to frame this as a \u201claw-enforcement action\u201d, but framing it as a \u201cwar\u201d (particularly after two horrendous world-wide conflagrations in the 20th Century) I don\u2019t think is the right label either. It smacks too much of viewing the world as basically hostile, with \u201cus and them\u201d in some sort of Armageddon, when over 99 percent of the people you would ever encounter on our planet would wish to be your friends.
\n
\nThe second thing I\u2019m ready to be done with is looking at our social interactions and developmental efforts as a struggle always featuring winners and losers, or \u201csurvivors\u201d and those \u201cvoted off the island\u201d. I guess it really pushes my buttons… Life is not a freaking contest!
\n
\nIndulging in this frame leads to many of my fellow Americans, including many members of the media, looking at politics as a spectator sport where one side triumphs and the other is necessarily vanquished. As is exemplified by the healthcare reform debate and its media coverage, the kind of compromise that is the reality (and even the hallmark) of the democratic system is not well served by this obsession with constantly calling out winners and losers. Given that there are the shrill voices of Fox News and others on the right, I am grateful in one sense that there is Keith Olbermann and others like him dishing it back from the left. But I would gladly make a deal that quieted both of these \u201csides\u201d in favor of more thoughtful discourse.
\n
\nThe third thing, and closely related to the first two I think, is framing the education and development of the next generation in such high-stakes \u201cnow or never\u201d or \u201cone size fits all\u201d terms. A six-year-old who is slow to read is not \u201cbehind schedule\u201d and should not be viewed as in danger of having a failed life unless they get back on that \u201cschedule\u201d. There is no single developmental \u201ctrain\u201d that everyone has to leap on as it leaves the station or be left behind. There always have been many paths of learning and will continue to be so, even as we currently obsess on one primary academic instructional path while we mostly ignore all sort of non-instructional learner-driven alternatives or real world mentoring and apprenticeship.
\n
\nOur education system has gotten so high-stakes in its orientation, that I\u2019m afraid we are producing a generation of stressed out young adults who will need years of one or another sort of \u201cmedication\u201d, whether it be real drugs, obsessive consumerism, or couch-potatoing vicarious media spectating to get beyond it. I don\u2019t think this is a recipe for building real agency in a new generation of people.
\n
\nFourth and finally (for now at least) and returning to health care, I\u2019m ready to be done with an American health care system that relies on the hit and miss of entrepreneurial capitalism to drive it. I truly believe in the power and efficacy of risk-taking, free enterprise in most areas, but as the saying goes, \u201cDon\u2019t fool around with your health!\u201d
\n
\nCreating a market environment where individuals and corporations can seek their fortunes providing (or not) medical services on a catch as catch can basis seems to me like the absolute wrong way to go. I believe we can foster a truly vibrant entrepreneurial society with more positive risk-taking by not keeping people in constant stress about their health, even though neutralizing this major \u201cprofit center\u201d of health care will hurt some.
\n
\nAnyway… those are my big four things that I would like to be done with, and I would be interested in hearing what yours are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"