Clip Wings or Cut Noses

No one owns the anger. All tax payers and politicians of all political persuasions are furious about the AIG bonus pay outs. Unfortunately, too many years of too little regulation have tied our hands to a train that’s headed for a collapsed bridge. Sure, we all agree that it would feel good to say fuck AIG, and let it burn… But is running the business of our nation based on our feelings the best idea? Wasn’t it our blind fury about 9/11 that kept far too many of us out of touch with the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? We could keep making the mistake of navigating by anger. We could cut off the country’s nose to spite AIG’s face. Or we could do what is distasteful but necessary now, while we endure the “feeling” that we’re rewarding the culprits, and later we can responsibly punish the culprits by clipping their wings.

If these corporations want to spit in the face of the tax payer by taking bailout money and passing it out in bonuses, let’s just remember that. We’ll keep our cool. Do what needs to be done to get through this mess… And then we’ll remember that spit in our face - and clip their wings so deeply that they will wish for nothing more so than the ability to go back in time to un-do the mistake of rubbing salt in our wounds. We can punish them plenty, by regulating the living crap out of them later. But let’s have the sense to get the tumor out of our body before we toss a grenade at it.

Touchdown!

Yeah, I know that sports analogies are done to death but I think I’m onto something here… The other day I was thinking about this inexplicable magnetism which persistently draws me toward the solution of any given situation. I was thinking about how this magnetism seems to be equal in strength to most peoples resistance to change. And as I shuffled through my general observations of strives toward solutions, something occurred to me in a powerful way.

I suddenly had a mental image of a guy running down a football field, carrying the football. And I imagined this guy weighing just one piece of evidence to determine whether or not he was actually running toward the goal. It was the singular fact that most of the people in his vicinity were trying to tackle him. And so the thought hit me – that one’s effort to arrive at the solution is very much like running for a touchdown. You know you’re headed for the solution because everyone’s trying to tackle you.

Either that or you're charging toward a cliff and your friends are trying to save you...
But hey, I guess you gotta take a chance!
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