Easy
Street
In a world regularly redesigned for convenience, the allure of easy
is hard to resist. From drive through banking to drive by shooting,
we take the shortest, fastest route to what we want, looking for simple
solutions, uncomplicated answers, and undemanding agendas. We
want a message that can be presented in seven words for print or fifteen
seconds for radio and television.
The truth is that great ideas require more than fifteen seconds to
explain. It takes more than seven words to get even a bad idea across.
The resolution of challenges from global warming and species extinction
to health insurance and traffic, will almost certainly be quite complicated,
requiring significant, extensive effort by a considerable number of
people. Complex essential issues ultimately affecting the quality
of American life, like the rehabilitation or reversal of an ever increasing
number of imprisoned criminals, or health care for senior citizens
and children, will take thousands of hours of discussion, thousands
of proposed solutions and thousands of failures before they are resolved.
There is no easy out. There may be a better way, but it will not
be simple.
Every Olympic year, we are absorbed by the stories of determination
and dedicated effort, the skaters on the ice every morning at 5 am,
runners who train for months and miles in heat and rain, athletes
who persevere despite financial hardship, physical handicap or injury.
For Olympic level contestants, the thrill of victory and the agony
of defeat are preceded by a whole lot of hard work.
Some things are just hard. Sometimes, the work has to be done.
There is a hoard of information available with just a point and click.
Some of it is even good information. But exploration of any subject,
with its incumbent investigation of history and the examination of
alternatives, requires more than point and click. The end result of
skimming off the top is just froth, no substance. The cream
is in the comprehension, and it demands a degree of depth that is
simply beyond Google.
Women often develop short-term attention deficit when carburetors
or the intricacies of computer use are explained. We just want
the car to go. We just want the computer to work. We want it to happen
without understanding it. But by abdicating responsibility for
such basic knowledge, we lose the potential not just for mastery,
but for discovery and insight.
There is no button to push that gives the information. A great
number of the places we need to go, the people we need to hear, the
things we need to know, are not available on speed dial.
It isn’t that hard work itself has virtue, although it may
and our grandmothers and great grandmothers were taught that it did.
It is just that everything isn’t easy and trying to make it
easy is self-defeating and time consuming. Many things
take time to learn, to do or to achieve.
It took thousands of years to discover the secrets of the atom, DNA,
viruses, electricity, gravity, relativity and space. We’re
still discovering how to use the information.
Surgeons don’t watch a video to learn to do surgery. Carpenters
don’t decide one day to build furniture. It takes a certain
number of hours to complete certain tasks and the fastest way to get
them done is to start, not try to find the shortcut. We shouldn’t
be afraid of an objective just because the path to it can be long
or difficult.
Easy Street may be the final destination, but it’s not the
road to get us where we need to be.
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