False Choices

“In ancient Rome, there was a poem, about a dog who found two bones. He looked at one. and then the other. Turned round in circles, and he dropped dead” -Devo

People are like that, sometimes. They’ll be talking about one thing and then somebody will bring up some totally unrelated thing and everybody switches to that and conversations, and plans, and projects fade into nothingness.
It gets used in politics a lot. Change the subject to your favorite subject, and all else is forgotten until somebody changes it back and you’re arguing back and forth about which things you should be arguing about, instead of arguing about what you should be arguing about. Paralysis sets in.
I was just in a discussion about Bernie’s plan to legalize marijuana by executive order on his first day in office, which I think is awesome of course because marijuana should have been legal always, and can have medicinal uses which will help lots of people, and mostly it will get a lot of people out of jail who shouldn’t be in there. Most people were in agreement, a few were worried that he was moving too fast, and then one person said “I don’t think marijuana should be legalized until after he’s closed the camps on the border.”
Of course I want to see something done about the camps, and Bernie is aware of that issue and also wants to find a humane solution. But these two things have nothing to do with each other.
Let’s not devolve into arguments about which issue is more important than the other. As Bernie himself is fond of saying “You have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”