We don't live in a single-issue world

As any election approaches, I get polling emails asking me to list my priorities for the country. What is most important to me? If I had to pick one or two things, what would they be?

Interesting intellectual exercise, but we don't live in a one-issue world.

Sometimes the poll will ask me to rank a long list of issues in numerical order from most important to least important. This is supposed to provide more detail and nuance, but that's another illusion. I never see a list that I can comfortably organize that way.

It's become a cliche that "everything is connected," but everything is connected. We can't solve one problem at a time. We can't half-solve a problem and call it good enough. Numerous philosophies have tried to blunt the human predilection for selfishness and violence. Not one of them has yet found the balance between permissible self interest and complete submission to the group. The philosophies read well. The basic principles usually include something like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But what if you're a masochist?

The destruction of our environment is not just an aesthetic question. It's become a matter of survival. But we can be personally odious in a pristine environment. We can be greedy, racist, misogynist, bigoted assholes who shoot each other over a petty insult. We can have a profit-driven system of health care services designed to enrich the management and stockholders of a few corporations. So maybe we solve the environmental threat to basic survival and still kill each other off in plenty of other ways. We can produce plenty of carcinogenic chemicals in carefully isolated areas and still maintain just enough natural environment to keep the planet's life support system basically functional. Sound good to you?

All human conflict comes back to well-documented items on the naughty list. We can chip away at those behaviors while the atmosphere rapidly becomes toxic with the untreated exhaust gases of industrial society. Maybe we will enjoy one glorious moment of global unity just before we asphyxiate.

It all seems overwhelming if you look at it all at once, but we've avoided looking at it at all for so long that we can't look away any longer. Immigration and refugee displacement is a problem because the places they live have been made uninhabitable by human policy decisions. Humans decided to make messes that drive other humans to seek safety elsewhere. Humans implement the policies. Humans justify their indifference and hostility to each other just to get from one day to the next.

Political reality is not reality. An elected official has to get into office by appealing to enough voters to get elected, and then fulfill the duties of office under a different set of pressures from ordinary citizens and from information that might not have been available to them before. Sometimes they just lie. Sometimes they are forced to change a position because circumstances change. Government is where the fantasy life of voters comes up against the thorny tangle of real problems. What gets a person elected and re-elected might nurture the fantasy life while letting the tangle grow out of control.