Over the past few weeks as the presidential race for party nomination heats up, a lot of questions have been brought to light in both the news and everyday conversation.
From immigration reform to the War in Iraq, people are talking and taking sides with one candidate and/or their ideology.
Watching this take place has given me the chance to see something I did not realize was there, and it is troubling.
I am talking about how we Americans go about "problems" and "problem solving".
It seems to me that both candidate and citizen a like, encounter a problem and are to quick to look for an answer rather then first, looking and analyzing what in fact the problem really is.
Anyone with a formal education knows that in order to solve a problem, whether it be business, social, or political you have to know the specifics of the said problem, what factors are contributing, causing, etc.
to whatever it is that's wrong.
If you do not have a firm grasp on these then you will be hard pressed in coming up with a solution, or answer which will be able to address the problem at hand.
Let us look at the War in Iraq as an example.
You have Republicans preaching "we must stay", "leaving would hand power to the terrorists we are trying to fight.
", and so on.
And on the left you hear a lot of, "get out now", "we are stuck in a quagmire", "we are creating more enemies then eliminating", etc, etc.
OK, so we have established who stands where on the problem of what to do in Iraq, but other then the slogans, and campaign pitches, some of which I have listed above, there has been little discussion looking at the real situation, and the many factors surrounding it.
I mean, why should we stay, what about the situation should lead me to support us staying in Iraq? And on the flip side, why should we leave? What would we gain from picking up and leaving right now? I understand the arguments that we were lead to this war by lies and twisted intelligence reports, but that does not change the situation we are in now, and now is what I am concerned with and all that anyone should be concerned with in my opinion for none of us can go back in time and fix the errors that were made in the past.
And by no means am I going to let the right off the hook either, we are there I know this, everyone knows this, we watch the news.
But regardless of what "might" happen down the road, what about this conflict makes it worth staying.
What will we gain from this? When will we know or claim victory (for a second time, Bush all ready claimed this once.
) Will it be a victory when they have a functioning democracy? Look at what happened in Palestine, we pushed and pushed for democracy there and what did we get? Hamas, elected by the people and for the people, an obvious set back for stability in the middle east in the eyes of many.
So what will our extended presence in Iraq do to better the United States in the long run? And please do not answer "to win the war on terror", there have been radical groups who utilized "terror" for the past thousand years and there will be for the next thousand.
I want to be very clear on the fact that I wrote this not trying to push either a liberal or conservative stance on any issue, the Iraq war was an example I chose to illustrate my argument not voice my opinion.
I wrote this because I think that one of our countries biggest problem is how hasty we are to look for solutions while not taking the time to understand the problem, and that is a dangerous and polarizing way to go about problem solving.
Our media and politicians really should spend a little more time opening the dialogue surrounding the problems we are facing and helping us understand every angle of them rather then force feeding us there solutions which bear no real answer.