Tis' Always Easier to Want Than to Do

My son has become not just a big basketball fan, but he's become a huge fan of the intricacies of putting an NBA team together.  He's obsessed with the draft and free agency and the decisions that go into building a great pro team.

And like so many of us, he wants the teams that he follows to make the bold and exciting moves that can bring about great success.  "Trade this player; cut this one; draft this guy."

Of course often times - as is the case with most teenagers, and quite a few adults - he doesn't see the other side of the bold and exciting move: the difficulty in finding a trade partner, the difficulty in cutting a player with a guaranteed contract, the uncertainty of the draft,.

I raise all this as an example of something that afflicts us all: wanting vs. actually doing.

I just heard the now famous podcast between Marc Maron and President Obama and have been fixated on one thing the president said: it's easy to have a political philosophy and to boldly pronounce that we need to do X to put our country on the right track. It's an entirely different matter to actually do something that is going to get passed and going to work.

He brought up the Affordable Care Act as a perfect example.  Easy to say that all American's should have access to quality affordable health care.  Entirely a different matter to actually do it.  The ACA is the most ugly and hated piece of political sausage any of us could remotely stomach. It's so far removed from the pure and ideal concept it started out to be.  But in order to get something even remotely close, it had to be stuffed through a grinder of political machinations most of us can't even imagine.

The president talked about the idea that in our democracy, one can only steer the vast ocean liner about 2 degrees to the north in order for the huge ship to reach its intended port some ten years down the line.  You simply can't turn it 50 degrees and get it docked immediately where you want it to go. If you did, the whole ship would simply explode.

That's the thing we have to learn as we grow older and accumulate more experience.  Nothing will ever be perfect, least of all national policy.  The best you can hope for is small, measured and incremental changes that hopefully over time get you close to your original goal.  And you probably won't be around to see the actual benefits in action.