Focus on What We Agree On

Some people think man-made global warming is going to kill us all and destroy the planet within 10 years. Some people think the entire idea of man-made global warming is a hoax. Does this mean we’re at an impasse and nothing can happen? Far from it, but the politicians set us up against each other in order to get votes. If politicians really wanted to solve problems, they’d focus on what unites us, rather than what divides us.

Case in point–pollution in Los Angeles. Only a bizarrely crazy person would make the claim that Los Angeles doesn’t have a pollution problem. LA had a problem with air pollution 25 years ago when I was a kid growing up in Arcadia. There were days when I could hardly see down to the end of my street, and if I went out and played for an hour my lungs would hurt every time I took a deep breath. It happened every summer. I’m sure that as more and more people have moved to LA the problem has only gotten worse.

Part of the problem is nature itself. Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs sit in a valley which the natives used to call “the valley of eternal smoke” because they would light fires and the smoke would go straight up and sit there in the air for days because there was no wind. Every year the Santa Ana winds come through and clean everything out (if they don’t stoke fires and burn everything out) or it will rain once in a while and that gets rid of the air pollution. But much of the time LA is buried in a thick haze that’s plain for anyone to see.

Environmentalists and “global warming deniers” can both get behind doing something about this and cooperate. Environmentalists can do it in the name of saving the planet, and the other people can do it in the name of protecting their own lungs and the lungs of their children. But the point is to set the goal up as “clean air in LA,” not “save the planet,” if you want to get as many people involved as possible and make a real difference.

The same goes for other issues. No reasonable person likes wars, people being shot, or abortion. That is, even if you believe it’s a woman’s right to sleep around as much as she wants and have 10 abortions per year, you aren’t actually hoping more women do that and you aren’t trying to find ways to increase the number of abortions because you think abortions are a good thing in and of themselves. We all want less abortions, we just have different ways of how we think that should happen. But what if there is a way to make less abortions happen in a way we both agree on? Shouldn’t we be looking for that way so that we can cooperate and get something done, rather than yelling at each other?