Five questions on which to base our New Year’s resolutions

Customarily we resolve actions for the new year. In this unusual time, answering burning questions may help shape our thoughts about what we should resolve together.

Five questions on our list:

1. How can we resume talking together and really listen to each other? 

We all say we talk together – but we seldom talk and listen to people whose views are very different from our own. 

It’s easy to talk with those who agree with us – preaching to the choir – but how can we break down barriers that prevent us from hearing those on “the other side” of big questions of the day and actually consider what they are saying?

If you have no idea what I mean, you haven’t spent much time recently in what until a few years ago were aptly named the United States of America. Can we all at least get to the point where we agree that we ought to live up to the word United?

2. How do we plan a future when nobody knows the track of the covid virus?

It’s hard to think of anything that does not hinge on the path of the virus. Is omicron the last of the variants or just one more? Should everything come attached to a Plan A, Plan B and Plan C, all linked to the path, severity and lifetime assumptions of covid?

It’s difficult to plan your work, financial, recreational or family life without considering multiple-covid-related alternatives, because covid affects everything.

3. What is the path of inflation?

We’ve lived for years in a world where younger wage earners have never considered the path of rising costs as a major factor. Yet our grandparents or great-grandparents may have lived through dark days in Europe or Latin America where costs of everything skyrocketed out of sight and money had to be spent today before losing half its value tomorrow.

A common guess for 2022 is 2.6% inflation, which would not be a major game-changer. But what is the chance of that estimate being widely off the mark, and what could it mean to everything from government and business to personal finance? This is a new consideration for many in the US workforce.

4. How can we better spread the pie around?

We have for decades seen the middle class, which was once the undisputed strength of the United States, shrink as both ultra-rich and the poor sectors expanded. This is widely seen as both a great inequity and a recipe for national disaster. 

One of our great economic and societal strengths was the hope – based on experiences – that a family could rise from poor to middle class in a generation and from middle class to rich in another generation. That ability to rise (or unfortunately fall) made us industrious, hard-working and to an extent unified in the knowledge that everyone had a chance and that the game of life was not rigged.

We know this was far from universal – some ethnic groups started with a great handicap in the race of life – but millionaires did sprout even from groups in which most members felt discrimination. It was much harder, but still very possible, to achieve great success.

How do we get the nation on a course where the gap between rich and poor narrows, not because we necessarily penalize the rich but because we empower everybody else to join them?

We don’t oppose a billionaires tax, depending on how it is structured and administered, but we desperately need broad economic opportunities for all who work to actually achieve.

5. How can we share a common civic knowledge? 

A few decades ago all of educated society (not just professors, but every high school graduate) shared knowledge about what was happening around the globe, across the nation and in their home towns. We all learned of current events with the same facts and precious few opinions from the media of the day. We trusted them all.

Whether you read the newspaper or watched ABC, CBS or NBC you got the same vital civic and government news. Americans had no disagreement about what was happening, even though we might have felt very differently about it. That gave us basic knowledge and the ability to interact as a united society that could then debate whether something was good or bad and what we ought to do about it. That’s the only way a democracy can function. 

Without common facts, you can’t debate them. You can’t vote on something if half the people don’t believe it’s a real question. And today, we’re divided over what is real, because far fewer media report what everyone agrees is reliable fact, not opinion. 

There were always folks who thought the world was about to end, or that (blame Orson Welles) Martians had landed in New Jersey. But today, about one-third of us believe what two-thirds think is just as off base as Martians.

We need strong news media to provide information that is commonly trusted as a basis for rational decisions.

Each of these five issues is worthy of debate. We need the answers.