I use Barataria to throw out a few ideas and new perspectives that I’m not entirely sure of myself. I hope you see this as a way of thinking out loud. Difficult social topics are rarely settled in one person’s mind, no matter how much they are mulled over. I want to take the time to tell you where I’ve been going with some of this and see what you think.
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Awfully Artificial
Words mean things, or so the saying goes. Unfortunately, things change so words have to change. That’s where it gets interesting.
Sixteen Tons
I have proposed that understanding the connections that make up a system give us a greater insight into how that system will respond to the stresses of change than any kind of institutional or academic perspective. My readers have responded by demanding specific examples, so I thought I’d start with the big one: Health Care. The system we have was developed from the connections of a time that has long passed but once made sense. This becomes important because most of the current proposals reflect the connections of our time – meaning we could be making the same mistakes all over again.
Platform
What are we gonna do? If you read those of us who kvetch constantly about not just what’s wrong but exactly what’s wrong you probably get a kind of fatigue after a while. That’s understandable. I strongly believe that if you are in the business of pointing out the bad stuff you have an obligation to produce a credible way that it can be fixed – or else it’s just whining. While I’ve done my best to produce a framework for understanding how things can go wrong that includes ways to understand fixing the world, it requires a lot of working through the abstraction – and brain ache.
This is where I get specific. This is my platform.
Baratariana
In the two years I’ve been writing Barataria, I’ve taken one sick day and one vacation day off from a MWF schedule. I’m proud of that record, but with my parents in town and a potential new business opportunity starting to fill my thoughts there wasn’t much room left for a piece today. So I’ve decided to do a clip show – a few highlights of pieces from Barataria past that seem to be popular. I hope you enjoy them!
