Issues Must Be Faced Before They Can Be Fixed

 

About a month ago, having a cup of coffee and reading the U-T with my wife, I was not paying much attention to the background drone of the morning TV show hosts. But when we heard this statement both my wife and I independently were struck by the depth of its insightfulness. Almost simultaneously we turned to one another with reactions bordering on ”Wow, did you just hear what I heard?” The guest being interviewed had said, in a matter of fact way, “We can’t fix what we can’t face.”

It was a simple truth, stated in the context of the discussion of civil rights and racism in the United States. But like so many other simple truths, it can be applied to a multitude of issues and challenges. Also, because it is short, easy to remember and yet so powerful, I wanted to share the phrase with you and ask you to send me examples of situations where this truth applies. I will publish the list while maintaining strict confidence in the sources.

Applications can be personal or societal. On a personal level, for example, I know several people who avoid conflict and controversy at any cost (and typically there are costs involved). As a result, they do not play a role in the resolution of the controversial issues. And by not playing a role in resolving difficult problems, from time-to-time conflict-avoiders find the resolution of those issues to be less beneficial if not downright counter to, outcomes they could have achieved had they gotten involved. For this group of individuals, sadly, any and all controversial issues are beyond fixing, influencing and controlling.

For most people, specific issues but not all contentious issues arise that they find difficult to address. It’s not an important or embarrassing issue so I’ll give an example involving me.  Actually, I wrote an essay on it you might have read sometime mid-pandemic. For about 20 or more years my wife and I kept accumulating “priceless” items in our garage, like hundreds of candles large and small and of all colors, or multiple sets of board games. We couldn’t face the growing mound of “priceless” items because often one of us considered an item valuable and a treasure to be cherished while the other wanted to pitch it. Bottom line: we did not want to face days of conflict over what stayed and what was to be given away, sold or trashed. By benign neglect we let stuff accumulate.  Even landfills get full at some point in time, and while not a landfill our garage was rapidly approaching capacity.

So I agreed to face the accumulated treasures by myself, promising to show genuinely valuable items to my wife before disposing of them (or of my own accord putting them into garage cabinets). In the end, I became part of the solution and made sure “my” treasures were retained. And because I love her (and she would have remembered valuable items in any event) I made certain none of my wife’s treasures were dispatched either. To my consternation, however, while we did eliminate at least 90 percent of the visible clutter, we did not increase the supply of empty (hence newly usable) garage floor space whatsoever, because what was left are the large, heavy items that are unwieldy to move around, much less fit into the cabinets in the garage.

In contrast to the personal types of issues needing to be faced and fixed, there are any number of societal or public policy issues deserving to be fixed.  Some have been faced and efforts made to deal with them, with mixed results, such as homelessness.  Others are not being faced and hence have not yet been fixed, such as (in my opinion) accreditation standards for candidates for public office. Still other issues get highlighted but don’t get addressed on a timely basis and eventually a disaster happens, such as the condominium building that collapsed in Florida this week, the one where the building’s owners allegedly had been warned about the dangers several years ago.

It is a good mental health exercise to list examples of face it/fix it issues in our personal lives and in society. I invite readers to submit their ideas, identifying them as being personal or public and whether they are being addressed or avoided.  I would be happy to publish a list of the examples as part of the goal of these essays to promote learning and thinking.  Don’t worry about an elegant presentation, please. Just type up a few examples and email them to me sometime soon.  

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