• I was going to write a blog in response to a vile comment made on my son’s Facebook page by one of his old middle-school friends. But I decided against it. Everyone knows how much anger and hate there is in our world without my repeating it. The better thing for me is to offer an alternative.
• Sign in front of our local pizza shop: “Whenever you lose hope, remember that God is still on the throne.” So, take comfort — even God gets constipated.
• Which brings to mind the old riddle about immovable objects and irresistible forces…
• One more day. One more day until the start of the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign.
• After the election, I’m going to have to buy a new TV remote control — the mute button has worn out. (That was a joke. I should send it to Jay Leno. I can picture him frantically pushing an imaginary mute button as the audience chuckles.)
• The older I get, the less resilience I seem to have. Here I define resilience as the ability to deal with the everyday problems of life with a minimal expenditure of personal energy. One response to this is to try to avoid problems. But this is tantamount to avoiding life. The better approach is to build one’s energy reserves. What works for me in that respect is good food, acts of creativity, and doing something nice for someone else.
• I am not superstitious, but I am sure I will never miss that extra dollar or two that I add to a server’s tip. It’s my version of what-goes-around.
• I have decided to once again stop shaving my upper lip. When a man doesn’t shave his upper lip, we call the result a moustache. When he doesn’t shave his scalp, we call it hair.
• Not that the readers of this blog need any more convincing, but I have further evidence that man is not descended from monkeys. When I am washing the dinner dishes, I always save the spatula for last, so I can use it in the meantime to scrape food off the frying pan, cookie sheet, etc. No chimp would ever think of that.
• At the TEDx Asheville event yesterday, one presenter discussed our reluctance to face our deaths and asked us to imagine what we want our last day of life to be like. I would choose to have a dinner prepared by and shared with my wife: filet au poivre with a side of macaroni and cheese and a glass or two of Auxey-Duresses from that little roadside winery we visited in France way back when. That would serve as a good close-parenthesis when the time comes. But why wait? (For the dinner, I mean.)
I know you’ve heard it said: “They’re all bums and liars; we should vote them all out.”
The premise seems to be, if only we got rid of this bunch of scoundrels, their replacements would be upstanding, dedicated civil servants working tirelessly for the public good. What a breath of fresh air for the nation.
Nice try.
Even if we Americans were able to take concerted action, we would no sooner “vote them all out” (as this website advocates) than the supposed bums and liars (whom we gladly elected the last time around!) would simply be replaced by new ones. It is a fantasy to think otherwise.
Perhaps it is the nature of man or the constancy of the forces involved — money, power, fame, ambition — that makes otherwise earnest men and women turn into shills for their party bosses. The inevitable result: you stop listening to what these people say, because they simply echo the talking points distributed that morning from party headquarters.
Congressmen and Congresswomen will never, never, on their own, initiate a Constitutional amendment that would limit the length of their own terms and serve to check their power. So the only practical way to create the upheaval that “voting them all out” purports to achieve is the State Two-Step: state conventions propose congressional term limits, and then three-fourths of the state legislatures agree to ratify them.
I am attending the TEDx event in Asheville this weekend. TEDx is all about change, about “ideas worth spreading,” as they put it. Someone needs to grab this idea and spread it, because otherwise it ain’t happening.