Treating Symptoms a Losing Endeavor

If you only treat the symptom you'll never cure the underlying problem, and the symptoms will just return again and again.


The above is a paraphrase/summation of a bit of wisdom my father taught me as I was growing up. He had to repeat it a time or two because I was a young idealist bent on saving the world and quite convinced I had the PLAN. He would calmly talk me through to the logical conclusion of whatever my latest PLAN happened to be thereby showing me I had, once again, not thought it through.


This concept is nicely demonstrated in the old adage, "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime."

Its antithesis, however, can be found in the rallying cry, "There ought to be a law!" It seems that, or some variation thereof, is all I ever hear anyone say anymore.

• I lost my job; we need to make a law to take care of me.
• Someone offended me; there should be law.
• That private business lets people smoke near me; we've got to fix that.
• Those bikers are getting hit, going to the hospital and driving up insurance prices; helmet law!
• ...and so on.

I'd like to insert here a completely impractical wish. I would love for everyone who wants a piece of quick fix legislation enacted which is designed to save him/her from the vagaries of fate or the consequences of his/her own actions to have to attach to it another bill designed to help some other poor slob with his/her individual problem such that providing for the second bill would have direct negative consequences on the proponent of the first bill.

If everyone had to take a personal hit each time he/she tried to hit up everyone else for his/her own solution I wonder how long it would take before folks quit running to Uncle Sam for a hand out and started finding other more personally responsible solutions to their own problems.