The question is specious. Prior to the Trump presidency a border wall was debated, agreed to, and reached partial implementation. Our most recent President made it into an issue for one reason, and here it is:

Democrats are famous for “feeling your pain” but have managed to ignore or un-feel the “pain” of every Trump voter there is. Trump found places to drive a deep wedge between the Democrats and the folks who elected him.

He pushed much, much too hard to get various elements of his agenda written into law, but dropped the ball w/r/t stronger physical barriers on our southern border. His tom-foolery cost his party the House of Representatives.

Who doesn’t see each of the above points? Who, better yet, fails to ‘get’ the point about the Democrats drawing political lines which have excluded / demonized more and more folks over the past decade or two?

My baby sister adores Trump, and while vocally Christian, loudly demands that the immigrants approaching our borders show the oil in their lamps (one of Jesus’ parables, about the five wise and five foolish maidens) – clearly they are foolish and need to spend the rest of their lives weeping and wailing in the outer darkness.

Personally I think we should open a complete Ellis Island at every border crossing. This nation survived huge inrushes before, and many of them a) were Catholic, b) did not speak English, c) had very little formal education, but d) were willing to work very, very hard.

Can anyone spot the parallels here?

Today at a good-bye luncheon featuring Colorado University’s outgoing and hugely effective president Bruce Benson, someone gave me an acrostic. This person asked for LOVE HELP PEOPLE and works developing gifts that fund medical research, in the medical part of CU.

Love tells me “help;” it’s my heart’s raison d’etre.
Of all the works there are, mine satisfies
Voracious yearnings, needs that are unmet
Except for raising research to the skies.

How great it is to round up gentle gifts
Expressing laymen’s love for C U growth.
Link donors’ legacies to science: lifts,
Provides the linker with a bit of both.

Partaking in the mission of C U
Enables me to help, with grace and style.
Of course, gifts are the Heavy Lifting; new
Potential partners are my “run the mile.”
Let all be said and done, I love this place –
Extended open hands fill mine with grace.

Forced, and in places corny, but the person I wrote it for was an English Major in college, so knew what a sonnet was! Grinning.

But wait, there’s more! Latest round of Ordowahl, book one, has the title “Ordowahl, Manhood” and here’s the first new sonnet, that bridges chapters 1 and 2. No longer do the sonnets recap – too easy. Now they ask leading questions, e.g. “So that’s what that meant, – what omen does hit hold, portend, present?”

Becoming man shreds childhood’s safety. Death
will trouble Ordo should he linger. Life
lies elsewhere. Kinfolk help him catch his breath
while he wends wayward, shuns both realm and knife.

Did Dad say Ordo is his Solomon?
How does that doom the best he’s bred to flee?
What planning did he fail, what unbegun
precautions, outcomes did he not foresee?

Unblessed, alone, Prince Ordowahl sets out
to make the wider world his home. So much
to learn, so innocent, naive, devout –
arms wide to fate and GOD’s protective touch.

Let’s guess that on his way he wanders south;
Cross mountain? Chase a stream to sea, its mouth?

Much longer answer given elsewhere. Shorter answer:

A) Formal payments by employers and some copayments by employees, plus copays given to providers, plus private health care premiums, plus medicare taxes and post-retirement contributions for Parts A, B, C, D etc. form a sum $S.

B) While $S is less than what is spent annually on medical care in the U S, it’s very large.

C) Invert the rules (laws) which today permit insurers to void and re-write their contracts of care on an annual basis. Make it say, “Committed until the patient chooses another vendor.” Period. Let patients opt out on birthdays, e.g. vendors get one year not patients.

D) Acquire embarrassing, invasive data from every patient – full history, hobbies, associations, criminal and driving record, DNA, age sex race parentage sexual proclivity and tons more. All under HIPPAA privacy, but acquire it.

E) Have all current health insurers pool their collective actuarial wisdom to develop a cost table capable of defining, to within some target percentage (single digit, greater than 90 % accuracy) the likely cost of care of anyone. See D above.

F) All patients, via fingerprint / SSN / retina scan / you-name-it, CHOOSE THEIR INSURER. Insurer receives, from central taxing authority empowered to collect all of $S, their projected cost. Of course we’ll need to make $S come out in the black, but consider this: medical care in the rest of the free world keeps everyone reasonably healthy, and at 65 to 75 cents on the dollar relative to what we spend here.

G) As needed expand $S by setting medicare taxes such that anything under $15/hr pays nothing, and graduated up such that professional salaries where employers shell out as much as a thousand dollars a month hit the employer with an appropriate share of that amount, and no salary cap. Employers may get to burden their employees with a minor share via a cost split., but that’s in the details.

H) CONSEQUENCES – high-dollar end of life patients get fought over, because optimizing their care provides a good return on their very high care remuneration. Keeping them in good spirits becomes a primary goal. If in-home care saves money, it will happen.

I) Managing health, not injury, leads to better return on care dollars. Insurance companies still exist, still run in a capitalist manner, but have profit motives connected in equal harness with good outcomes not cheap ones, via C) above.

J) As providers compete for improved outcomes, medical costs should also decline because everyone will receive care, meaning expensive emergencies due to delayed minor care will tend to decline. People without doctors today cost a ton of money when they show up at the E R. They get care there but it’s late hence very expensive. Heading those problems off via regular maintenance care will put us in line with the rest of the free world.

This version of “medicare for all” subsumes today’s medicare bureaucracy, sadly, but gets everyone covered (yes even folks who cross the border without a formal invitation) and does so in a “Republican cloth coat” capitalist fashion. Just let someone slip this idea into the White House and NeoCon headquarters, so they can take credit – the important thing is, just do it.

Here’s the deal: some students still have to memorize the times-tables in the second half of elementary school. All the way to 12 x 12. Their teachers give them problem sheets with fifteen or twenty simple multiplications, and the students race to see who can finish first without a mistake.

This not only requires memorization, it etches the times-tables into their little brains. Add-subtract tables are good ideas too, by the way. What happens as a result?* As adults, those same individuals have a lot fewer problems with and a lot fewer fears of arithmetic. They turn out better-adjusted, if you will.

Memorization is not an either – or, it’s a both-and. The one shibboleth regarding el-hi education that sets my teeth on edge, like fingernails on a blackboard, is “Which would you rather do, cram them with facts or teach them to think?”

Tell me, please, how on earth anyone can contrive a reasonable argument with nothing factual to found it on? Words make language possible. Facts and words are both necessary to make thought possible. Constructing a real-world debate on any issue you want to name is going to require definitions, and those are also called (drum-roll, please) data. A.k.a. facts. Own  them or die.

Here’s a real example; there’s a movement afoot in University circles promoting the idea that the sciences are inherently racist and genderized (white males, bubbula) because they exclude “other ways of knowing.” Please form a line; all those who step forward will be permitted to fly in an airplane engineered using “other ways of knowing.”

Soapbox off.

Ah, not just rote memorization but rote methods. Soapbox on again. For a time it was gospel that math was a language skill, tested by returning rules of operation in whole sentences. Don’t just sit there and make columns of numbers that slant back to the left as you multiply two large numbers because THAT IS ROTE KNOWLEDGE and WE WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND WHY.

This is like conducting Driver’s Ed from behind a desk, and expecting the student to know what happens when you step on one of the pedals in front of the driver, because that student is proudly verbal, in full sentences, about what is supposed to happen. And we wonder why the rest of the world turns out kids who do math with intuitive understanding. Their kids get real pedals to push.