Steak & eggs or pancakes for breakfast. A woman named Rhonda or Barbara Ann as our only dating option. Even in marriage when it finally arrived, we had choices.
But two?
In some things, it might work.
On or off, that’s easy.
In and out is a favorite, and very helpful when entering or exiting a house.
Even wet or dry can come in handy when discussing saunas, but what about political choices?
When the free world is at stake; when our freedoms are threatened and words like autocracy and dictator enter our newsfeed are two choices all that we need to avoid dissolution?
Stress and Making Decisions
No one likes stress. And yet multiple choices are stressful. A ten-page menu, for example, is far too many.
Like work and paying the mortgage isn’t enough, we have kids and their education, second cars, and teenagers backing up through garage doors.
Life is one long, as far as the eye can see, test to see if we have what it takes to get through it unscathed.
Many of us think we’re failing or about to and worry that there's something wrong with us. That we’re not cut out for the life everyone else seems to be living well.
And if we’re not sure about ourselves; if we have any doubts, there's always a politician ready to step in and give their opinions about what we should do. And all it takes to resolve it is a vote.
But sometimes hearing two sides of a story is not enough. There’s no guarantee that either one is right.
More is More
When we go online to shop, we smile when we see 12 stores carrying the kind of shoes we want and feel even better when three of them are having sales.
Numbers are good, numbers can be in our favor. Sometimes numbers unknowingly help us decide what is best because they are what they are without opinions.
Politicians on the other hand are all about opinions. They thrive on bias. They live on one side of an argument or the other. It’s a rare politician who straddles a point and feels comfortable on either side.
But we the people, need more. We need information that is a clear and accurate representation of reality.
Someone who can describe a sunset as it is without getting all emotional and won’t spend half their words on how it made them feel.
We need people who work for us, not their supporters who bankroll their campaigns.
Wouldn’t you look closely at a study that could affect your health and future, if Big Pharma fully funded it? Would you want to know if their findings had anything to do with their upcoming sales quota for the next year?
And yet we’re surrounded by “sponsored information.” We see this on Google Search Results all the time, where the first several listings are paid for.
Are they the best results – for us?
One Party, Two Party, Three Party More
Our two-party system always threatens to expand right when dire consequences are being foretold. A moment when the government is about to be shut down, or chaos is building up steam, and heading straight for us. When the last thing we want to do is splinter one party’s vote into two and lose the race.
So, we drop it. We kick that can down the road until we’re confronted with no viable choices.
Like some of the corporate mergers being planned when we’ll end up having a choice of products that are expensive or very expensive. Where quality will be okay or not okay.
Even Baseball Has a Better Way
Today we have Democrats and Republicans. We can say we have Independents and the Green Party, but are they serious choices or ones we shout at when our candidate loses by 400 votes?
This needs to change.
Today On or Off isn’t good enough. We need levels in between. We need incremental change.
Even baseball has a “farm system” that creates good ballplayers who have a chance at being in the majors.
Politics has a backroom.
How to do this is not clear or easy. Maybe that’s been the point- it's best to leave it the way it is.
But as with everything else, there’s a way. We need to find it and exercise it, before bad and worse are our only choices.
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