Rated PG-13 for mild peril and mass casualties. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.

This rating summary was given for the new movie Supergirl and this writer is pretty sure the people who wrote it either missed the irony or thought is was a good joke.  Presumably “mass casualties” is a genre of entertainment that any person over the age of 13 can incorporate, without too much trouble, into their 21st century working sense of the world.  This assumption is, of course, nonsense.  Nonsense is a sharp blade though, for it has almost defeated America.

We are living in hot times.  Our president and his cult of leadership are characterized by hot tempers, cold strategy, insults, and wild unpredictability.  The cult has split the American democracy using the blow torch of divisiveness and the world is accelerating toward ignition.  Probably most of us can see what is coming, but what can we do between election cycles?  This writer proposes practicing making better decisions based on fact and integrity.  This project, The Good Decision, is an intentionally designed decision model to begin the exit from a cult mindset that can write a sentence containing the juxtaposition of  “mild peril and mass casualty” leading to such a benign conclusion.  When is comes to designing a way out of the tragically ludicrous, lets start with a quote from designer Carlo Ratti in a New York Times article in which he addressed the very controversial new fully electric model of the Ferrari. 

All design is a quarrel between two impulses: the wild idea and the cold edit. Unleash the wild, and you get baroque chaos. Lean too far toward cold, and you get vanilla or gray. . . .Each designer knows how difficult it is to balance both forces, like reconciling the right and left brain hemispheres.

Our design out of this cultural wreckage needs good decisions. Any decision called good is not good because it is closer to either the wild idea or the cold edit.  The key word here is “impulse”.  We don’t need impulsive in government.  The heat destroying our democracy is being generated by ill considered, wildly conceived ideas poorly articulated  and coupled impulsively with the extreme cold edits of conspiracy. Impulsive extremism on both ends of the design of government and personal mental health is taking us down. 

A modest proposal for good

Make good decisions.  A good decision is not generated by a vanilla process or absolute moderation. A good decision comes from a personal discipline working with the requirements of family, community, the body politic, and the sense of service.  The value of this discipline for good decisions is in the model’s scope of considerations.  It is the hard work on the scope of your own decision process needed by the world today. In democracy, the bannisters of public good must guide the decisions of democracy.  The balanced use of the “left and right brain” is why the American political system was designed to establish a power balance in the first place and for the duration of the Republic.  The balance of power is how we have historically has frustrated the impulsivity of wanna be autocrats. The left and right brains while scientifically mapped out are also working metaphors commonly understood in this culture. What this writer learned from Carl Ratti is inspired ideas need to put on their daily work clothes of community and law to be anything more than fantasy disguised as public service.  The good idea needs to be expressed in unambiguous, clear language.  “Mass casualty” is a life crippling tragedy for anyone at any age and is wholly unrelated to “mild peril”.  We are getting used to nonsense in an age begging for clarity and sense.  Lets design a better way to live in this ‘high promise’ country of ours.  That would be good. The design of your decision process and its practice will fill the time before we can go to the polls to reset America.