An election can remind us of the obvious.

Logical ramifications, unintended consequences, and the basic value of fairness can get lost in the uniquely contradictory routine and hectic jungle of daily life. The power of voting helps bring them back to the forefront. This election identified and reestablished many.

Ramifications, unintended consequences are always present but seldom considered. When any committee or organization’s board is solely composed of like-minded individuals it’s a dictatorship. Its results will confirm the status quo, lack innovation, and seldom lead to effective decisions. The most valuable elements of diversity are varying skills, experience, and opinion.

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A library allowing availability of all materials to anyone, regardless of age, is actually taking control away from parents rather than facilitating it. It’s not a banning books issue, it’s limiting parents’ ability to make and implement family decisions.

Publicly funded abortions will increase their number. Why use prevention when one can involve the doctor for free.

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We’re realizing we shouldn’t make things more difficult for parents. Duties still include explaining the birds and bees, but today that’s not sufficient. Now they must explain the bees and the bees, the birds and the birds, the birds that used to be bees, the bees that used to be birds, the birds that are confused and look like bees, plus the bees that look like birds but still have a stinger. Being a good parent is tough enough.

We believe in fairness.

We don’t feel diversity, equity and inclusion are bad. We support their true definition. It doesn’t mean excluding one group in favor of another or specifying one group and providing them an advantage not available to everyone. That’s only fair.

It’s not fair to attempt to change reality. People can identify as whom or whatever they wish but can’t demand special treatment as a result. It’s not fair for a person with male equipment to compete against women. Equity is defined as fairness. It’s not equitable to forgive the college debt of those choosing not to work as much as possible and making repeated poor career decisions and not equitably reward those who had the moral conviction to pay their debts.

We’ve realized fairness also means consistency, logic. Parker says, “Abortion is wrong.” Helen says, “You can’t have an opinion, my body my choice.” Helen says, “You have to wear a mask here.” Parker says, “my body my choice.” Helen responds, “But you could kill an innocent person.” That’s hypocritical and not fair.

The government keeps telling us Social Security is running out of money, but we never hear the same about welfare.

We’ve realized it’s arrogant to feel we have the right to go through life without anyone saying something we don’t agree with or like. We need to toughen up. We don’t have the right to singularly declare something offensive. We can say “I find that offensive.” That’s ok. None of us possess the right or wrong gavel.

Some use “I’m offended” to self-elevate themselves. They’re frustrated because they don’t feel important. Consequently, they’re looking for an easy way to feel superior. It’s like the person who’s making unreasonable requests, giving a hard time to a restaurant’s wait staff because they can. They don’t feel in control of their life, so they control the waiter. It’s the same with the guy who doesn’t flush the public toilet. It’s sad their lives are so bad in their mind; they have to go one on one with a toilet to have a victory.

If we believe in diversity that also means diversity in words, opinions. We can’t use the word only when it meets our needs.

If we’re not happy with our lives: change; ourselves first. Any change in career, location, circumstance, will have short-lived effectiveness if we aren’t the person we desire first. Look at people you admire, like to be around. Odds are they work hard, do more than their share, offer to help, are pleasant, smile, have an upbeat attitude about life, share the credit, are generous. Others turn us off. We don’t look forward to seeing them. They’re grumpy, focus on the negative, find problems not solutions, take credit for things they didn’t do, don’t show up on time, aren’t reliable, blame others. Why not be the person you desire? Write down things you like about five people you admire and write down what you don’t about five people. You can be the things you like and eliminate those you don’t. None of the things are difficult to put into our lives. We can choose the type of person we want to be.

The Harris campaign spent $1.5 billion, Trump $480 million. Consequently, TV ads aren’t the key to victory, which is a good thing. There are more significant ways for our country to spend $2 trillion. We must find a way to reduce that figure. The media will obviously fight it, but there must be a way to decrease spending without limiting free speech and still provide us with information required to make an informed decision.

We can’t let earth’s politics, or our situation distract us from our purposes in life whether they be heaven’s or our own. It’s more than not doing the undesirable. Do unto other as you would have them do unto you means doing the positive. It takes one visual, charismatic politician to overtly change and not only say “no more” to personal attacks, inflammatory words, insist on considering ramifications, fairness and follow through with action. Someone must start and we have the personal responsibility to demand it of ourselves and then others. All would be desirable New Year’s Resolutions for both our country and us.

Bryan Whiting feels most of our issues are best solved by personal responsibility and an understanding of non-partisan economics rather than government intervention. Comments and column suggestions to: bwpersonalresponsibility@gmail.com.