We are a nation of managers. We don’t deal with or address our problems, we manage them. We see that something bothers us, and rather then full address the problem we abate the problem. A man goes to the hospital with a sickness. We treat his symptoms and to a lesser extent, try to treat him in ways that would allow him to return too much of his function as possible. Yet, we don’t usual go a deeper level to understand what in the environment made him sick or how he could avoid making him sick.

Let’s think about some other examples of our ills and how we manage them but don’t address them:

• Black Poverty
• Environment
• Obesity
• Trash

Black Poverty. We built public housing. We did thing to put blacks out of sight and out of mind. We oppress blacks with the criminal justice system made to control only their actions. Yet, we rarely do much else to help their condition or alleviate the attitudes and conditions that contribute to their condition. They are managed but not helped.

Environment. We often pass complex laws to deal with complex environmental problems. Our attitude is that the environment can be saved by bureaucrats and regulation. Those laws create a form of management of the environment, yet they often fail to protect the environment.

Obesity. We live in a sedentary society. The solution according to our federal government is to just get moving and do exercise. It’s not about changing our lifestyle fundamentally so that it won’t permit riding of elevators in and out of air conditioned building that make it comfortable even for the most out of shape people.

Trash. A few generations ago we decided it was okay to waste things. We created a whole infrastructure to haul trash off and dump it in the woods somewhere. We managed it, yet we failed to address the problem of our wasteful society. We kind of managed it and put it in its place.

It seems that any solution to our problems should not be about abating and managing a problem, but to take it on directly. We should try to approach things as directly as possible, and use our political processes to attack a problem as successful as possible. In many cases we might only be able to manage a problem, but we might be able to do a better job then we are currently doing.