Dear President-Elect Trump:
With the exception of death, every problem in life is potentially solvable. Someday we will solve the problem of terminal illness. We could alleviate hunger, strife, war. Those are all solvable problems.
We could solve societal issues now if we possessed sufficient collective desire to solve them.
Financially, our country teeters on the brink of a bottomless abyss. Our national debt grows every second like a fast-moving scourge. Yet we fail to balance a national budget. In fact, we didn’t even pass a federal budget for six years, until last year. These problems are not so significant that 535 bright minds in the country can’t find a way to pass or balance a budget. They don’t possess the collective desire to do it.
49 of 50 state governments balance a budget every year. Are they so much smarter than our congress? I don’t’ think so. They have a legal requirement to balance their state budgets. That motivates them sufficiently to do it.
I’m confident that some representatives and senators want to balance our budget. But collectively, they do not. Otherwise, they would.
Intelligent and creative humans can solve nearly any problem when they possess enough creativity, desire, and willingness to work together.
A construction worker drove this point home to me quite effectively a few years ago. He was on the job and working without a shirt. He had an elaborate tattoo—full of symbolism and amazing art. I asked him about it and he explained the meaning of it. Then he told me that he’d had it done in prison.
“In Prison?” I asked. “How do you get a tattoo in prison? They don’t let you get tattoos in prison,” I remarked. His answer reaffirmed the power of creativity and desire.
“You just have to want it badly enough and be creative enough.”
Tattooing requires, among other things, ink and motor driven needles to inject the ink underneath the skin in quick piercing motions, neither of which is available in prison. Knowing this, I couldn’t help but ask him to describe the process. He taught me that when we put together a group of people with similar ambitions and enough desire, they will find a way around any obstacle to accomplish their goal.
Here’s the process he described.
Disclaimer: Don’t try this at home.
Making Ink: To make ink, the prisoners collect hair gel and cotton strands from worn jeans, a AA battery from a tape recorder, toilet paper, regular writing paper, and a used razor blade. Each of these items is available in prison.
They put the hair gel into a plastic cap, and mix the cotton strands from their jeans into the hair gel. Setting that mixture aside, they remove the individual razor blades from disposable razors and use them to connect the positive and negative terminals of the AA battery.
The electric current from the battery turns the thin metal from the razor blades red hot. With the razor blades red hot, the prisoners light the toilet paper on fire.
Using the fire from the toilet paper, they light the hair gel/cotton strands mixture on fire. The combination works as a form of a candle.
With the candle burning, they create a small tent out of paper to collect the soot from the burning hair gel/strand mixture.
When they’ve collected enough soot, they mix the soot with water to create ink.
The soot and water mixture is the ink of a prison tattoo.
Making a motorized needle: For a needle, the prisoners disassemble a retractable ballpoint pen to use the spring of the pen. Straighten out the spring and it can be used as a needle. To motorize the needle, they take apart a cassette music player or a cd player and use the motor from the music machine to provide the piercing and pulsing vibrations of the ink spring needle.
Making the tattoo: The tattoo artist lays the subject on a table in a prison cell with other prisoners keeping watch for approaching guards. Over the course of several hours, the tattoo artist (another prisoner) dips the ink spring needle into the hair gel/cotton strand soot ink and with the aid of the cd player motor, injects the ink under the prisoner’s skin. The result? A tattoo in prison.
Balancing a budget and making prison tattoos are very different skills. But they share a common denominator: If you have enough desire you can use the tools at hand to achieve your objective.
The collective betterment of the country has not given Congress sufficient desire to come together. Maybe we should try a different approach. Let’s merge their collective interest so that they will balance our budget. Let’s find a way to not pay them their annual salary if they don’t find a way to work together to pass and balance an annual budget. Don’t balance the budget, don’t get paid.
Most Americans don’t get paid if they don’t get the job done. Let’s require the same from them.
I think we’d be shocked at their collective willingness to find the common ground necessary to balance our budget.
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
