Quick and Easy Part 2

Saturday's blog post was titled Quick and Easy Part 1. When I was halfway through it, I knew I had enough verbiage to publish. I wanted to write more, but as I said in the post, I was ready for bed. So I published what I had and began this post.

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America has changed in many ways during my lifetime. "Quick and Easy" has become a maxim for many of us. But life in America wasn't always easy, and I think it bred a different kind of American. As I mentioned in my last post, my grandmother would have to build a fire in a wood stove if she wanted to cook food. It was hard, but you can bet she learned patience.

Now, we want instant this or that: instant coffee, instant tea, instant hot chocolate, instant powdered milk, instant freeze-dried fruit juice, instant oatmeal, instant grits, instant noodles, instant mashed potatoes, instant rice, instant pudding, instant soup, instant MRE (meal, ready-to-eat).

Some of us want many more things to be instant. They want life's problems to be solved instantly. They want the nation's problems to be solved instantly.

The answers to the nation's problems can often be boiled down to that age-old predicament: Should we each promote the common good, or should we each follow the maxim "every man for himself"?

Often, issues have two solutions: an easy one and a hard one. We can allow people to live in storm tunnels underground and in tents above ground, or we can do the hard work of finding a solution to homelessness. We can put impoverished, desperate people in cages, or we can do the hard work of finding a solution to the poverty, crime, and wretched quality of life that drives illegal immigrants to this country and too often to their deaths.

America has changed, and the world has changed as well. Finding a solution to a difficult issue will not be easy, and there may be no solution that pleases everyone. A solution will require thought and effort and may require a degree of sacrifice from some of us. But I suspect that the "easy way" to solve an intractable problem—a "solution" that is often simply a feel-good, knee-jerk reaction—will not work. If it would, such a problem would have been solved long ago. A problem persists because it's a hard nut to crack. Even so, it behooves us to make the effort.