Let’s Get Going

It's Time to Never Close Some Inquiries

When I first decided back in February to start this newsletter, I set a goal to publish my first post on August 12th, my dad’s birthday.  Fast forward a few months to May and I moved that date up to June 26th, the day after my mom’s birthday.  I even posted my plans on Instagram, X, and LinkedIn.

But plans are overrated, and in the legendary, sanitized words of Bill O’Reilly, “WE’LL DO IT LIVE—SCREW IT!”*

*He didn’t say “screw”

So, welcome to Never Close the Inquiry!  

For this introductory post, a bit about what the newsletter is and isn’t:

1. It isn’t a place to revel in the failures of or gnash our collective teeth at the successes of a particular political party.

Partisan diatribes can be a heck of a lot of fun.  There are great places to get them, including here on Substack.  This isn’t one of those places.  It’s not that I don’t ever agree with a good old partisan rant or want to engage in my own—sometimes they’re right!  Sometimes, one party is doing stuff that really isn’t going to age well (frankly, standard practice might be that both parties are always doing at least one or two things that won’t age well, but more on that later).  Ranting at them might seem a righteous response, but what’s the point?  Trying to fix things in America generally means getting more people to agree with you (especially if those people happen to be in Congress).  I think yelling isn’t a very good way to accomplish that.  If you disagree, please identify yourself so that we can do some yelling at each other.

Additionally, political parties aren’t sports teams.  My favorite teams are the San Francisco Giants and the Utah Utes.  I don’t care if Jesus personally joins the Dodgers’ outfield or BYU’s secondary—I’d still want them to lose every game, and preferably in devastating, soul-destroying fashion.  The same is not true for politics.  I’ve generally voted for Democrats, but if Republicans come up with a good idea, I’m not going to reject it because of its Republicananity or change a couple of words and call it a Democratic idea.  Party cannot become more important than country. 

2. It is pro-America.

I don’t mean that this is going to be an uncritical place to bask in the glorious parts of America’s efforts during the World Wars and watch Top Gun: Maverick on repeat (although I do recommend we all do that on our own time).  But I am an American writing an American newsletter from an American perspective.  I’m not going to intentionally whitewash a darn thing, but I believe in America’s past and I believe in America’s future. 

Could America be better?  My gosh, absolutely.  It will be a crying shame if it doesn’t get better.  But it can, and part of the point of this newsletter is to do what I can to help, which I think at this point means emailing at a bunch of people.

Lastly, I do not at all mean that to be a good American you must support the current party in government, the current system of government, or really much of anything—one of the great beauties (I think) of our system of government is that you can believe pretty much whatever the heck you want, and, as long as you don’t get too much in the way of other people believing whatever the heck they want, that tends to be okay.  I recognize that freedom here isn’t absolute, but if you look around the world or just a bit back in time, it gets a lot less absolute.

3. It isn’t just about politics.

Politics matters—a lot, in many cases.  But politics isn’t everything, and, if the government is really doing its job, most people won’t have cause to think about it very much.  So, if you want to read about politics, but also want to take a breath and read about sports (advance warning for the baseball-impaired—baseball will come up the most), people (an upcoming article—On Heroes: Why Tom Cruise Being a Weirdo Doesn’t Make Me Not Want to Sprint Like That at 60), and a whole host of other things (this week—river otters!), this won’t be a bad place to be. 

4. It’s a place for digging deep.

Individual newsletters won’t be long—I’m aiming to make each issue readable in under ten minutes.  So, to avoid delivering shallow summaries of complex topics, I’m going to do series, and we’ll cover the topical big stuff: immigration, abortion, Israel-Palestine, foreign involvement generally, tax policy, economic stimulus projects, homelessness, Social Security, healthcare, and so forth.

If the goal is to foster broad mutual understanding of underlying problems and competing perspectives—and that is the goal—it’s going to take a while.  There might be five to ten emails in a row on a single topic.  Once we get through a full series, I’ll send out a consolidated version so you have everything in one spot.

Other Media

The plan is to turn all posts into podcast episodes that will be available on various podcast platforms and YouTube.  While we’re getting that going, if you’d prefer to listen than read, give me a call and I’ll read everything to you directly.

Acknowledgments

There are so many people that have already given me so much support as I try to get this going, but I’d be particularly remiss if I didn’t thank my parents and, most of all, my wife, Kaylee.  She has been immensely supportive at every step despite the real risk that comes with starting a newsletter and putting my thoughts out there for the world to see.  I also want to thank my son, Jack, who is not yet old enough to tell me this is a dumb idea.

Random Fact of the Week

One of my middle school travel ball coaches dubbed me “Hagenomics,” which he defined as “the study of useless facts to be brought up at random times.”  So, with thanks to Charles Ellis, here’s this week’s random fact:

For every human in the world, there are one million ants!  (Six year old me outside with a mallet on a hot summer’s day: “There is much work to be done.”)

Subscriber Update

We’re up to 51 subscribers, which isn’t bad considering all of those sign-ups predate this first post.

Only 8,113,165,938 to go (approximate world population as of this writing, minus 51).