Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, January 19, 2004.

It's like when you go to the grocery store on an empty stomach and that gallon of Moose Tracks ice cream sounds like it would sit just fine on top of that gallon of sauerkraut.

It's like when you start to plan a new house project and gilded gold strikes you as a sensible solution to your need to unify the look of every plumbing fixture.

It's like when you begin to talk about summer vacation and it seems perfectly reasonable that you can comfortably reach those 43 destinations on three continents in just seven days.

So it goes when a new law is to be written. We're filled with the excitement and the possibility of the idea. The difference, however, is that heaving up moose-kraut, getting a written estimate, or consulting a map very quickly bring us to reality in the previous examples, whereas the harsh ramifications of an overly ambitious law may not hit until years after it's enacted. And then it can hit over and over again.

Examples: Term Limits (Hey! Let's exercise our rights by limiting them! And then complain when there aren't enough qualified people to run the legislature.) Mandatory Drug Sentences (Hey! Let's solve our drug problem by not letting judges judge. Then we can let our prisons show those small-time offenders the road to the straight and narrow.) Constitutional Amendment Defining Marriage (Hey! Let's -- oh, wait, that one hasn't actually passed yet....)

But back to the topic at hand: This week's comic is addressing a possible November ballot initiative here in Michigan that would ban affirmative action programs for our public institutions, most notably the University of Michigan where the Supreme Court last year ruled somewhat in favor of it having such a program.

In the comic, I spelled out some of the thoughts I have on race relations and tried to demonstrate how difficult it would be to reconcile them into a single law. I mean, it's no wonder that our legislature is wussing out and letting "the people" decide this with a ballot initiative. If it was easy, they would be doing it. They aren't, and it isn't. I don't think something as complex and dynamic as race relations can be sufficiently addressed with a simple law (or quantified by a complicated one).

It's messier than that. It's something we all have to work through and not expect a law to magically fix things for us. Sounds difficult, if not impossible. But maybe this is where we should look at Dr. Martin Luther King for inspiration. He was certainly less than perfect and some would say deeply flawed, and yet he was able to say and do extraordinary things. As a fellow flawed human being, at very least, that gives me a common starting point.