Before my daughter was born, I taught at a school fairly close to my house. In fact, it was my alma mater’s rival school. The principal there used a cool slogan he wanted everyone to memorize. It was easy enough. “It matters” was that slogan. It matters was a way to tell us that everything we do matters. There is nothing too insignificant to get attention. Every detail must be important.

The problem there is that he was absolutely wrong. It really is no surprise. I did not last on that campus and neither did he as it turns out. However, it took years for me to discover that. If everything matters then nothing really matters. Such a statement is kind of a paradox, but if you game it all out then it starts to make perfect sense. You can’t focus on everything because if you focus on everything then nothing gets done.

I had a golf swing instructor basically tell me the same thing as a kid. I couldn’t possibly think about everything while swinging. I had to focus on one or two things and do the best I could. It’s the same for basketball players shooting free throws, hitters at the plate, and kickers about to make the winning kick in a football game. If you bog yourself down with too many thoughts you’ll fail every time.

The worst thing we tell children is that something matters when it really doesn’t. In the case of our campus it is dress code. It really doesn’t matter. We have kids showing skin in all kinds of places we never would have dreamed of doing. We have boys with full beards and students with visible tattoos. These things are all against the dress code, but we have collectively decided that it just doesn’t matter. We never said as much, but our actions (or lack of action) indicate that it doesn’t matter. The worst thing we could do is tell kids that it does and let them learn quickly that it doesn’t. Just let it go.

We bring all this up to show how much of an uphill climb progressives have. We care about a lot of things. We care about gun control. We care about the environment. We care about fair elections. We care about education. We care about the wealth gap and making sure everyone has a fair shot. We care about black lives. We care about LGTBQ+ rights. We care about women’s rights. We care about health care and our access to it. We care about all of these things and more.

What we run into are people that have either figured out that it all can’t matter or they just don’t care about all of those things. They care about one or two things. They want to keep their guns. They want to make abortion illegal. They want to make sure girls are the only ones playing girls sports. Each of those things have a dedicated group of their own that are always there to scream their point of view. The rest of us scream for a week or two and then shift to one of those other issues. We switch when something happens that outrages us and pulls our attention from the other things. So, our opponents just have to wait us out.

We must be more organized. We must manage our forces a little more wisely. In short, we have to forget the idea that it all matters. Yes, it all matters. However, we can’t have everyone focused on an issue for a week or two. We have to have fewer people dedicated to an issue all the time. We need others dedicated to those other issues. If we apply constant pressure across the board then we have a chance to get movement on these things. That’s what the other side is doing. They either figured that out a long time ago or they literally only care about their guns, abortion, or the other stuff.