It hit me a little when I was sitting in mass. We do the usual things because I suppose the usual things give us some comfort. Of course, the faithful hopes it does more. We said rosaries for Ukraine and we ultimately hope it has some positive impact. So, it isn’t the prayer themselves but what we say before the prayer.

The priest told us we were praying for all of the world leaders to come up with a peaceful solution in Ukraine. He’s a really great guy (the priest). I know he means well and I imagine most churches are saying something similar. Yet, that sentiment hit me. We are operating in this situation as if a global community needs to come together to come up with a collective solution to a problem where multiple people are involved in the causes.

There is one man. Ukraine didn’t do this to themselves. Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t do anything to anger or provoke the Russians. The European community, international community, NATO, or the United States didn’t do anything specifically to invite Russia to invade Ukraine. This was a decision by one man, so any praying needs to be done for the victims, but also for that one man.

This is usually where conservatives point fingers at liberals and liberals point fingers at conservatives. If only you would have done this or said this then none of this would have happened. It’s a trap. Vladimir Putin is a bully. Like most bullies, you either stand up to him or you don’t. There is little rhyme or reason to their behavior, so it’s more about you reacting to him than him reacting to you.

This is one of those scenarios where the former guy’s behavior comes under question. He seemed way to eager to be Putin’s friend. He seemed way to eager to go along with him at all of their various summits (particularly at Helsinki). So, the obvious thought was that he was indebted to Russia in some way. There were some shady business deals that seemed to indicate that.

Yet, that line of thinking is probably trying too hard. The former guy’s pathology is easier to grasp than that. He likes all strong men because he wants to be a strong man. So, he may have gotten help putting him in office, but it might not be anything other than Putin feeling he was better for them than Hillary Clinton.

On the flip side you have the other side wondering if Biden is too old. Maybe he isn’t tough enough to show the resolve necessary to steer the world through this situation. Maybe a strong man would be the best thing to help combat a strong man. Except, we aren’t exactly sure whether the former guy is anything other than a paper tiger. He acts tough though and I guess that’s enough for some.

Again, this is simple. This isn’t about the world developing a complex strategy to deal with all of the players so they can come to an equitable solution. This is about one man flying off the handle. It is about the world simply putting that man back into a box or six feet under in a box. Everything else is simply a distraction.

Yesterday was an interesting day in the World Geography class I support. See, the district made a huge deal about the teaching of controversial topics. It isn’t even so much that we aren’t supposed to do it, but we have to be so careful as to not interject our own opinion into these things. Then, the teacher found a worksheet that described health care costs in the United States and nine other industrialized nations.

The teacher gave me the worksheet and asked me to look at the first question. It looked a little loaded and so we pivoted a little and hedged our bets. We looked more carefully at the whole sheet (including the graph) and there was no way to spin it. All of the questions were loaded. It presented facts that could not be disputed and yet framed the discussion in such a negative way that you wanted to call the policy fight before one side got killed.

See, according to the graph, the United States spends more than 15 percent of its GDP on health care. Naturally, you’d have to read the fine print to know exactly what that all entails. We could naturally assume they are talking both health insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses. The other nine industrialized nations all hovered around ten percent. Sweden was the lowest at 9.3 percent.

We include the usual caveats in a conversation like this. Why did those that make the graph pick those specific countries? Wouldn’t we need to also see what people are getting for that care? The worksheet even asked a question of what we would expect to see in terms of quality of care.

We avoid teaching these things because we are under the impression that we have to show both sides. We are under the impression that both sides actually have equal merit. This is where we’ve landed in terms of political correctness and bending over backwards not to appear to have a liberal agenda. A worksheet clearly shows we are spending too much on health care and we have to somehow tiptoe around that.

There used to be a day when we could all agree on the facts before us. If information presented itself that we spent more on health care per capita then any country in the world then we could all agree we are spending too much on health care. We could all agree that you don’t pal around with white supremacists or sing Vladimir Putin’s praises.

Politics used to be about accepting reality and then suggesting ways to make it better. If we want to stop a Russian mad man do we simply clamp down on him with more sanctions or do we actually physically intervene? We acknowledge that racism exists. We acknowledge that there are cases of racial bias in the judicial system and other systems. We endeavor to find ways to remove those biases.

In terms of health care, we acknowledge we are spending too much and too many families are financially ruined because someone got sick. Of course, acknowledging that also forces us to acknowledge our own greed. We would acknowledge that we are the only industrialized nation without universal coverage. We would have to acknowledge that drug prices are higher here and insurance companies make a bigger profit here.

We used to acknowledge that mad men shouldn’t have access to automatic weapons that can kill people by the dozens. We used to acknowledge that consumers deserved basic protections from predatory lenders or those that would swindle them. The debate came in how we protect people. It came in how we best serve their interests. It came in just how involved the government needed to be in providing these solutions. No one ever argued that these were good things. At least they didn’t until now.