While preparing a Substack essay on organizational problems, I thought of the great John Lennon observation:
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
I would add this: "The most dangerous distractions are disguised as something else."
That's a small part of my upcoming analysis. It should be out in a few days.
[Photo by Stephen Ellis at Unsplash]
Edward N. Luttwak wrote The Endangered American Dream in 1993.
It's both disturbing and strangely amusing to see his analysis of the American Border Patrol at that time. He notes that as of 1990, the Border Patrol only had 3,857 agents on duty. That included those at the Mexican border, the Canadian border, and Alaska.
In contrast, he noted that Italy had 53,000 border guards plus the Carabinieri and the police for passport control.
He also noted: But preemptive declarations of impotence that disregard perfectly available remedies have become something of an American habit. When gangs were rampaging in Los Angeles in their regular everyday fashion even before the spectacular May 1992 riots, the city authorities reacted by asking for sociological studies of the gangs. Actually it is the city authorities themselves that are sociologically much more interesting and definitely worth studying: with a population of 3.5 million, the city had a grand total of 8,381 police officers (yes, eight thousand three hundred eighty-one), a ratio of 2.3 per 1,000 inhabitants. That would be just about enough for, say, quietly industrious Nagoya in law-abiding Japan. By contrast, the Italian countrywide ratio is 4.2 - though even crime-ridden Italy is a paradise of tranquility as compared to Los Angeles. The Border Patrol, or rather the lack of it on the Mexican border, is exactly the same category: self-inflicted impotence, rationalized as an inherent impossibility.
I tend to start my essays with A and then go to M and then perhaps back to C and D and then forward to U and V because, the entire time, I am circling the subject and trying to find the best way to find its core, so to speak, and that is the trick.
It is a way of learning by doing. So much of the time is spent determining the real topic.
How can I do that unless I write about it?
[Photo by hayleigh b at Unsplash]
