If you’re having a bad day already, you might skip this one.

I was forwarded an article from the National Review, Two Californias, by Victor Davis Hanson. Read it if you like, but let me summarize the basic formula:

“This stinks (insert lots of detail, leaving out any inconvenient historical context). And nobody’s doing anything about it, or they’re doing the wrong thing (insert disparagement of whoever “they” are, at the appropriate level of cleverness).”

Well, duh! It’s really, really easy to write this kind of article. What’s extremely difficult to do is FIX IT. And the worst of it is, this kind of article, on whatever topic, doesn’t do a bloody thing to instill hope, or motivate people to work together to try to change it.

What if every magazine or news editor, every TV or radio producer, tried to include a constructive article in every issue or program? Just one article with some hope, some solutions, some ideas for working together? Wouldn’t that help us to believe in and participate in this democratic society? I certainly do.

Do you think it’ll happen? Me neither.

But let me tell you this. In corporate America, if you tell an Executive about a bunch of problems, and you don’t bring him or her some options and solutions to choose from, nothing will get solved. Or worse, you’ll get some gut reaction solution that you hate.

So listen up, Author of Clever Problem Descriptions. I’m an Executive in the department of We the People. I have millions of Executive colleagues. You and your colleagues better start bringing in some well thought-out solutions with those cleverly stated problems, and include some win-win ways to sell those solutions to my colleagues. OR ELSE. Or else, We the People are gonna run this company — this democracy — into the ground.