When a question has no acceptable answer it may be abandoned. Or one might search for a more useful question.
A fellow got his truck stuck in a tunnel. Passersby stopped and suggested jackhammering the tunnel’s ceiling or chain-sawing the truck’s roof, each person arguing for his own solution — while onlookers took sides. And then a child said, “Why not let some air out of the tires?” The site of the problem seemed to be the roof, but it was not the site of the solution.
Parents in my generation obsessed with getting our kids to do homework. We shook our heads, as over taxes and bureaucratic stupidity. “How, how, how,” we asked, “do I get my child to Fulfill His Responsibilities?” And then I met one parent, who asked, “Do you work for the school board?” Ah. I did not. Why, then, did I consider it my job to enforce their rules?
Our efforts only increased family anxiety and strife and still no homework got done. Were we deranged? No, we were merely asking the wrong question. The better question, when we were faced with the agita of the insoluble Homework Problem, was “How do we increase peace in the family?”
* * *
“Yes, but,” we know, only means “No.”
Why the resistance? “Yes, but how will the child Get Good Grades?” A: Will he Get Better Grades if he is sullen and angry at his parents? Will he, in fact, do homework if he is sullen and angry? Further: What is the use of “better grades”? “He won’t Get into a Good School.” Yes, but the colleges and universities are a shameful sham (as we know as we have been there . . .).
So we, his parents, knew that grades were a sham and homework was a shuck on the part of the school board. What child would attend class for X hours a day, and then happily take on the role of his oppressors at the end of his workday and drudge through the evening while his bosses went free?
The child didn’t do homework, as he knew it to be an imposition that his parents endorsed, siding with the school board instead of with their offspring. Of course the children were angry.
Yes, but the Child Will Fail in Life. If he did not learn the dates of the Thirty Years’ War . . . ? Were his parents insane? Was he to have no insulation from the exactions of the adult world?
Asking a different question revealed the fatuity of the first: We could not force our child to do homework, and we knew it.
We might, however, work to increase household peace.
The plea of good intentions is generally an excuse for failure, folly, or inaction. (We do not say of our successes: “Yes, but my intentions were good.”) But, even in the case of achievable goals, they must be reduced to practicable objectives. Commanders on D-Day did not order the servicemen to “save France”; they said, “Get in the boat.”
* * *
President Trump began to bring peace to the Middle East.
He did so by asking a useful question: not How does one adjudicate between the Palestinians and the Israelis, but How do we support our ally, the Jewish State? All of a sudden Arab states saw that their best interests lay with those of a country that recalled it was a superpower. And they fell in with the program. This would have brought (and may bring, on reinstitution of support for the Trump program) peace to the Middle East.
The so-called Peace Process only brought war, as the Palestinians did not seek peace but the elimination of Israel, which was evident to all dispassionate (or “fair”) observers.
The Palestinians used “the Peace Process” as a public-relations tool and a money-laundering scheme: garnering funds for “a beleaguered people,” and spending the money on arms and Swiss chalets.
How could a rational human being credit their commitment to the Peace Process when their continually avowed aim was war?
* * *
How does one aid the homeless? Increasing their support only worsens the problem, attracting more homeless, and disincentivizes those (who knows what percentage) who might get off the public rolls and make a better life for themselves.
“Helping the homeless” is like building up the sides of a boat with a hole in its bottom. There is no height to which the boat’s walls can be raised that will stop the boat from sinking.
But we might ask “How do we eliminate vagrancy?” and solutions to “the homeless problem” (some, perhaps, humane) will present themselves.
We hear the endless jabber about the need for a “dialogue about race.” This is semantic bait-and-switch, moving our attention from the weak point of a declaration. (See Marx’s “from each, to each,” which finesses revelation of the subject: “The government shall . . . take from each, give to each.”)
Who is it who “needs” this dialogue? Or, in the words of Tonto, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?” A “dialogue about race” is just like the “dialogue” about homework. It means “Let’s fight.”
Just like the Middle East Peace Process, the Paris climate talks, and Hitler’s oft-renewed guarantees of “no further territorial claims,” the call for this “dialogue” is neither an invitation nor a request, but a strategy.
For, given this pointless, formless, never-to-be-actually-begun let alone “completed” dialogue, the race-baiters are free in their machinations. For they, in the words of Saul Alinsky, know that one must never make a demand that can be met.
It was the global opposite of fun to have a nightly fight about homework.
“Why must you always,” “why do you never . . .” are the hallmarks of a ritualized confrontation. They are not requests for information but attacks. As is the demand for the Race Dialogue, as are the supposedly rational demands of the U.N., et al. for Israel to negotiate for its annihilation.
“Why do I always meet the wrong women?” may be a plaint of bad luck but is, diagnostically, a confession of complacency. Either one “meets the wrong women” always because there are no good women (misogyny), or because one is happy in a single state, or perhaps socially incompetent. How can one know what the problem is? He cannot, as long as he is devoted to his handy question.
We may change the rhetorical question into a statement, thus: “I always meet the wrong women,” and, having named the problem, progress if we so desire to, “What might I do to meet the right ones?”
And we may obsess, wondering, “How do I get my children into a Good School?”; but the more useful question, “How do I help them become independent?” might reveal the first question as moot; or suggest a further analysis, thus: What do I mean by “good”?, or even “good for what?,” and, if the answer to the latter is not “independence,” we’ve just learned something.
“Are taxes just?” creates endless discussion, and the hypocrisy and duplicity such discussion invites. “What are taxes used for?” allows a definitive answer, which may be useful, inter alia, in determining if they are just.
Comments