Pascal texts me
“You want your readers to vote” and I just about go postal on him. I don’t want my readers to do a fucking thing, that I know of. i have asked a lot of questions. I have gotten some thoughtful answers to them, and some vitriol. That don’t confront me, as George Thorogood said, I’m pretty thick skinned.
Turns out what P is talking about is this post talking about a Mark Levin show where Levin talks about the game and the stakes.
The Levin show is good, as is P’s commentary. it is another answer to the question I have asked: How does not voting fix anything/make it better?
let me talk a minute about “Fixing”.
If your car starts making some squeaking noises under the hood, you can usually fairly easily find the problem. Today I helped my optometrist deal with this precise situation; we discovered the alternator on his pickup was failing as well as the water pump. We swapped out alternator, water pump and belts, all in about three hours. I was quite impressed.
Anyway, the parts have a lifetime warranty. And the truck is no spring chicken. Odds are that Dr W will trade in the truck before having to fix those things again.
Our FedGov is not like the alternator in a truck. It doesn’t consist of parts that can be replaced to make it all better again.
No, it’s a lot more like a lawn, or maybe even a garden. There’s a reason why Jerzy Kosinski chose a Gardener to be the ostensible profession of his character Chance in the book Being There. The analogies to gardening are stunning in their accuracy. The FedGov is like a garden in that it has useful and productive plants, old and non productive plants (I’m looking at you Dick Lugar) who are nonetheless still using nutrients, outright weeds, stony soil, fertile soil, parasites, plant eating critters, slugs, drought, damp, etc.
I once moved into a house in the middle of the summer. It had a garden that someone had planted, and it was full of good things, onions beans, tomatoes, peppers. It was also full of weeds.
Something in the back of my head said, fuckit, just till it under. But I ate a couple of the tomatoes and stayed my hand.
I spent just a few minutes a day, less than five, really, just pulling a weed here or there, hoeing the beans, tying up the tomatoes. By summers end it was a nice, sweet little garden, the produce helped us through some hard times.
Sometimes things are so fucked up it doesn’t look like there are any good fixes, sometimes there are no easy answers. Sometimes it’s just a lot of backbreaking toil and weeding to get things right again. Many hands make light work, though, and that’s why we each have a vote. The sooner we get to work, the sooner we get the parasites out, the sooner we lose the weeds and parasitic non producing plants, and the sooner we get to eat nice ripe tomatoes.
Well said, and damn the man who says otherwise.
More: the weeds cheat. And they NEVER stop.
In an episode of NCIS, the director of Mossad asks the director of NCIS, “Leon, tell me. Are we winning?”
And Leon — this is telling — STANDS UP to deliver his answer.
Think about that.
My answer: we cannot win. The Adversary will never admit defeat. However, we most assuredly CAN — and will — lose if we do not fight.
Voting is your least contribution to the fight.
M
Oorah.
Reading this, and recalling some things you’ve written in the past, just brought something to mind. The thing that the garden, the car, and the government have in common is that, left to their natural inclinations, they’ll all increase in entropy.
In all three, it takes effort to keep them in top condition. In all three, if you take care of little problems when they’re little (attending to a squeak, pulling a weed, throwing a bum out of office) the effort is minimal and painless (well, except for the weed or bum). If you let the squeak, weed or bum do its natural thing, well pretty soon you’ve got a big repair, a couple weekends of bending and stooping, or several election cycles of tossing out bums. The part that makes government worse is that half of your fellow citizens are below average in intelligence, so they may well WANT the bum in office.
Don’t know how much sense that makes, it’s clearer in my head than on the screen.
I think you got what im saying.
Well Said. I like Mark Algers comment as well. Just finshed 28 Pages. Man, if the media actually did its job someday.
We have exactly ONE chance left.
The soap box? Useless given how the media is bought and sold every day with some sort of currency that we can’t trade ours for.
The jury box? Nullified a long time ago by packing the Courts with political, not Constitutional judges.
The ballot box? We have one election left, one only. If we don’t get it right this time to reverse the socialist bull-rush now in progress, there will be no more chances.
The cartridge box. Would work, but despite all the guns out there, there isn’t enough fire in enough bellies to use them, and besides, it wouldn’t just be the hated government those rebels would have to fight, they would also have to fight the dependent classes. There aren’t very many fighters amongst the dependent classes, but there are enough bodies there to make effective cannon fodder.
Nope, we have to vote anti-Obama and pro-Constitution despite not getting a real conservative to vote for. If we fail, these past 236 years will have been in vain and we will just be one more socialist eurotrash failure.
As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.
I am glad you used the garden analogy. I had written a comment back for one of your posts near the beginning of May equating one vote to a seed, etc… but I didn’t post it. At the time it just sounded dumb.