It occurred to me today that we’ve got some fixes that we need to make, and putting them off has been hurting us.

I have, at many points in my life, been witness to systems not working.

I’m a Notre Dame football fan, and have been for my whole life. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Notre Dame football was a broken system. And, I remember hearing many times during those years, from different people discussing the subject,

“We need to get back to basics.”

I work in a school district that has struggled for significant stretches of time during my employment with the school district, in different ways. During those stretches, when people have been wondering what ought to be done to make things better, I’ve heard people say,

“We need to get back to basics.”

People say this when something is going wrong and we don’t know why, and normally people only say this when they’re talking about a complex system, since you don’t have to get back to the basics when things are already pretty basic. If my pen isn’t working, I’m not ever going to say that the solution to the problem is that my pen and I need to get back to the basics. After some basic troubleshooting, I’ll likely just throw the pen away and get a new one.

I think our society is at a point that it needs to get back to the basics.

The question then becomes, “What are the basics for a society?”

I can’t pretend to know or understand, but I think that something needs to be done and we can’t keep putting it off.

We need to get back to the basics, because we have a society that’s not working right and it’s time to fix it.

* * *

When you think of what “basic” means, and how to break something that’s complex down to its basic parts, it’s a pretty simple concept. Even the most complex of all systems can be understood and diagnosed by subdivision –> taking what is complex and looking at its subcomponents, and then looking at the subcomponents of each of the subcomponents, until you are able to understand the individual parts that comprise these complex systems. Our American society, as complex as it is in its many, many parts, has a basic foundation to which we must return our attention.

In fact, all societies have the same basic foundation. It’s pretty elementary, when you think about it…

PEOPLE.

For our society, and to a greater extent, our world, to be able to fix what’s wrong, we need to get back to the basics. We need to get back to people. As complex as American society has become, it is still, at its base, about people and their interactions with each other.

This is where America has become broken. We need to get back to being concerned about people.

And not just the people that we like, not just ‘our people’, we need to get back to caring about all people.

There are more than 320 million people in the United States, and each one of them, on each and every day, is interacting with other people. If every one of those people started being about the business of making sure that everyone of those interactions was a kind, friendly, considerate, compassionate, and open-minded interaction, we would have a better society. Because, getting back to the basics for our country has to be about getting back to being about people.

And I’m not just talking about live interactions, either.

Imagine if every one of our interactions with each other, on the internet and on social media, was an attempt at being kind, friendly, considerate, compassionate, and open-minded. In fact, I would dare to say that this is where a lot of the problem is coming from these days. It takes a particularly bold person to be rude, inconsiderate, nasty, and inhumane to a person in a live situation, but any coward can be a jerk on the internet, with very little fear of reprisal.

We need to get back to the basics of being kind to people on-line.

And, unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, we have some problems being kind, friendly, considerate, compassionate, and open-minded in our politics these days. Rather than listening to each other and valuing the ideas that might come from this political group or that political group, we have become confrontational and bigoted against our fellow humans just because they have different political affiliations. Politicians, and their fans, who spew hatred and lies and nastiness at human targets should be shunned, and the politicians who would spew hatred at the politicians who are spewing hatred are just as bad.

We need to get back to the basics of being kind to people in our politics.

One of our biggest problems, both historically and currently, is a tendency to treat people differently than we would prefer to be treated, based on how different they are from us. I feel like this is probably one of the stupidest approaches to handling one’s interactions with the people around, because for every perceived difference that I might have with someone else, there is ALWAYS more that I have in common with them than what makes us different. We are not different –> we are the same. That should govern how we interact with each other. If I’m going to legitimize, in my mind, mistreating another human being because I think they’re different than me, I’M JUST WRONG.

We need to get back to the basics of being kind to people who are different than us.

* * *

Our world is hurting, and it’s broken, and the system is so complicated that it’s hard to figure out what is working well and what is not working at all. In situations when it’s hard to know what to do to fix the problems, we need to get back to the basics. In America, we need to get back to being kind, friendly, considerate, compassionate, and open-minded with each other.