Is It Really “Better”?

Friday, July 17, 2026

You probably know somebody like my neighbor.  Given that there were only two landline phones in the neighborhood, the phone company had quit maintaining the lines.  He was one of those two, but the lack of maintenance had rendered that phone so unreliable that he broke down last week and got a mobile.  He got a flip-phone stating quite emphatically that he did not want a smart phone.  His complaint is not the usual complaints about spying that smartphones carry with them as a matter of course.  Rather he simply finds smartphones too complicated.  To his mind there is nothing “better” about a smart phone.

I just finished a reporting cycle for my clients.  Most people are unaware, but manufacturing businesses that use hazardous materials have to file dozens of government reports annually.  Recent decades have seen this reporting transition from paper to computer filing.  Each such transition was sold to the reporting community as a vast improvement – it was supposed to be “better.”  And perhaps it was from the viewpoint of the agency receiving the data, but in the case of the report I have just concluded filing it doubled the amount of time required to file the report.  The data is not different, but the computer reporting system is so clunky and awkward that simply writing the data on a sheet of paper is far faster than making all the keystrokes and clicks necessary to put it into the system.  From the viewpoint of the reporting community there is nothing “better” about it.

Better, as beauty, would seem to be in the eye of the beholder.

In 2020, covid saw massive changes in how our voting system operated – often without the legally required due process.  Those changes were all sold to us as improvements – they were supposed to be better.  Those changes came on the heels of decades of voting moving towards electronic systems, which again was supposed to make things better.  But as the president’s speech revealed last night, there is nothing better about these changes and systems.

And yet this morning the so-called news is already full of things that are trying to tell us that it’s not that bad; that the system really is not compromised; that all those changes really were “better.”  The president demonstrated with fact that the system is broken, rather severely broken.  But they know that if they can alter our perception just enough we will still think things are better somehow.

Just like the agency I recently filed reports with, the system is better from their perspective.  As the president pointed out, the current state of our voting systems is “better” from the perspective of those that use those compromises to gain electoral advantage.  But should not changes in our voting systems benefit all Americans?

I started thinking about this post before last night’s address by the president.  My point was to be that true improvement, improvement that is not dependent on viewpoint, was the kind of improvement that Jesus called us to make in our lives.  Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits.”  The Apostle Paul listed that fruit, “…love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control….”  Paul also pointed to Jesus’ example:

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.  Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,

The president was quick to point out that some in government hid these voting problems from the public and from elected officials.  What is obvious is that those people placed their own interests above the nations.  They missed the point Paul was making.

The president called for the SAVE Act to be passed.  So it should be.  But if we are really going to fix what ails this nation we have to look deeper.