Laughter is the best medicine

Several years ago I had the "opportunity" to mediate a dispute between two adult males. I can't call them gentlemen because their actions and behavior belied the concept of gentle and polite conduct.

One party was a real estate salesman who managed to talk the other party into bankrolling his excursion into the world of buying cheap and selling dear, i.e.: flipping rundown houses to gullible buyers. He was a good salesman, and I'm sure had the ability to successfully sell booze to Baptists, but his weakness was believing that because he was a successful salesman he also knew construction and project management. Events proved him wrong on both counts, but that certainly didn't stop him from believing he could pull a renovation off at the expense of whoever was bankrolling his project.

His partner was an equally good salesman, only his forte was separating people from their money with a variety of financial schemes, not the least of which was never paying an expense out of his share and always shorting the profits in his favor. Cheap seemed to be his mantra and if a coat of paint would cover the mold he would argue that watering the paint was the way to go.

The dispute that brought them to my attention was a simple purchase, renovation and resale of a house in an gentrified suburban setting. What should have been a 6 week flip had, by the time they came to me, lasted more than two years. People who live off the credulity of others depend on  verbal agreements and rarely utilize the written word to document their actions. Contracts are anathema and major decisions are made verbally  in a "we are both honest businessmen" state of mind. There was absolutely nothing documented outside the legally required property transfer when they bought the structure and even that contained clauses that a lawyer would find suspect and a judge would most likely find criminal. Both parties tried their best to persuade me that while he was as pure as driven snow the person sitting opposite him was the devil incarnate and that I should not believe a word he was saying.

My job was to find common ground and guide the parties towards arriving at a mutually agreed solution to the problem. Dealing with two self centered uncaught proto-felons was a sure route to failure and after several hours of listening to their repetitious justification as to why I should believe them and not the other guy I finally decided that they were never going to address the essential task of resolving the issue.

It didn't bother me that I sent them away without solving their problem. A problem they did not want to resolve, because each wanted to crush the other ... I guess because without knowing why, they each saw themselves in the other and didn't like what they saw.

My final task that day was to wait until they had departed so I could laugh out loud over their verbal antics and unprofessional behavior. As my folks used to say "You have to laugh, otherwise you'll cry"

Are we circling the drain?

 

In the past 50 years I’ve lived the experience of my country descending from an aware, confident and capable country to a neurotic, divided and self-centered collective of tribal states struggling for local supremacy.  I also believe that all the little power hungry groups that work so hard to create “today’s crisis” are not the true and basic cause of the issues we face as a nation. Black, White, Conservative, Liberal, Atheist, Practicing (fill in your religion), Left, Right, etc. are all labels that reflect what I believe to be the two positions that divide our culture.

 

What divides us as a nation more than anything else are the political, economic and social positions that proclaim that government is either the problem or the answer to all the problems we are struggling to resolve. These days they are usually describes as “Statists” or “Libertarian” and those are labels I can work with. Basically Statists are committed to the position that government is the answer and that anything that is not permitted by law is forbidden. Libertarians on the other hand are firm in their opinion that government is the problem and that if it is not forbidden by law it is permitted.  

 

While these positions might seem to be irreconcilable our system of governance over the past 239 years proves that if reasonable people, regardless of their political position are willing to listen to the other person’s opinion and to negotiate fairly the best possible solution will be arrived at. Our present problem is that, as a society, we have lost the ability to listen and negotiate and find common ground. Driven by liberal and narcissist attitudes and now an attitude adopted by all members of the social order we are a polarized nation.

 

I have concerns about how we can return to the balanced and cooperative society we once were. There is a high probability that whatever the solution(s) might be it will be dissociative and perhaps even violent. I grieve for my children and their children and apologize that as an ancestor I didn’t do a better job in preparing the way for them.