Mondays with Mike: Here's stuff that works. Let's do more of it.

Been cogitating on a bunch of stuff since last weekend, which saw hundreds of thousands of Grateful Dead fans come to our neck of the woods. I started on one topic but it sort of got out of control so I’m backing off and am going to keep it short here.

The upshot is what most of us know, whatever our self-identified political stripe is: politics gets so stupid that we’re never talking about what works and what doesn’t, at least in a rational, evidence-based way. Everything is reduced to symbols, moral finger-wagging, fear, hate, ad hominem attacks—you know the drill.

I think we can agree reducing teen pregnancy is a good thing. Then why not do it?

But there are people working to solve intractable problems—and they’re doing things that seem to be working. Here are articles about two of them:

• In Colorado, providing young women long-term birth control has cut the rate of teen pregnancy by 40 percent (and reduced abortions by 35 percent). Read this piece in The Washington Post—I did and I also read some other pieces about it, and it doesn’t seem to be an illusion. So, to those squawking about the demise of the traditional family, and abortion, if you really care, you should at least consider this solution.
• In Utah, The New Yorker reports those crazies out there are reducing homelessness by—drum roll—giving people places to live. Yes, yes, it unnerves all of us who obsess about anyone getting anything free—but read it. It makes perfect sense. Provide some stability up front to a homeless person and that person has a much greater chance of maintaining that stability than they ever do attaining it in the first place. When you’re homeless, it’s tough to solve problems.

These are great efforts that yield long-lasting benefits. To everyone. There’s hope, but we’ve got to neutralize the numbskulls somehow.