Figuring out what we the people want

I guess I just don't understand why it's so hard. Everything is so fraught with tension in the world of politics today but it seems to be that there are some fundamental things we should be able to agree on, right? Things like

• You shouldn't get Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid if you don't qualify for it - for example, if you don't actually exist (fraudulent SSN), you died a while back and someone continues to collect your benefits (fraudulent activity), or you were entitled at one point by now aren't (fraudulent paperwork)

• We shouldn't celebrate the complexities of a bureaucracy, especially when it's the bureaucracy that runs our country. Why don't we all want a government that is slimmer, trimmer, more efficient, and has systems that talk to each other?

I get - I truly get - that none of these things are fast, easy, quick, simple - whatever words you want to use. But what frustrates me is that so many people want to zoom by the fundamentals of "what" we are trying to achieve and go straight to the "methods". And yes, there are oceans and planets of room for debate about methods!

But here's where the next sticky wicket rears its ugly head. Let's talk for a minute about immigration; I can say that the Draconian policies put in place by the Trump administration have been necessitated by the lax border policies of the Biden administration. Someone else can then jump in and say that the Biden border policies came about because of Trump I policies, and so on, and so on. But how far back do we go? Take a look at a map of Europe if you want to see what it looks like to nurse disputes going back centuries. And we're only talking several decades.

I want us to collectively agree on the fundamentals, whatever they may be; then agree that the "yeah buts", finger-pointing, and "blamestorming" are done, and we're flipping over a new sheet in our pristine notebook. Now we can get to work on the hard stuff - coming up with a plan on how to get back to our fundamentals and have a nation we can all call home.