The News: Moves on the Chessboard

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

Time for a multi-item update.

It’s plain that we do not live in an age friendly to reaching for the sun, moon and stars on any of the issues facing Americans or any other public in the present world. And yet I just find the limited incrementalist horizon of many policy debates so confining and so intentionally bereft of any deeper motivations or goals that I want to look for something that shifts the frame, that brings the big questions into play in a different way, however minimally and pragmatically. (Or however foreign the frame in question might be to my own usual cast of mind.)

So maybe sometimes it’s worth looking for the small change of mind or the small shift in policy focus as a way to move off the more idealistic clashes about big principles and major goals. If nothing else just to see if that thinking can shift what otherwise seems immobile.