Reflecting on Politics the Day after My 76th Birthday [View all]

[MineralMan]

One of the things I have discovered about being an official geezer, is that I tend to reflect more often on history as it has taken place during my life. Politically, I've seen swings from left to right and back again a number of times. JFK to Nixon. Obama to Trump and then to Biden. Always, US politics is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth like clockwork.

Why? Because we are a nation made up of people who look at things very differently. We're pretty evenly divided in that way, so things go back and forth with considerable regularity. Over the decades, I've kept hoping that politics would swing to the left on a more permanent basis, but history demonstrates that my hopes have been futile.

Complacency seems to be the reason. When the left wins, the left gets complacent. When the right wins, the right becomes complacent. Human nature, I suppose. The only way we are going to be able to keep progressive politics in power for long periods of time will be if we stop getting complacent when we win.

When we win, that's exactly the time when we need to behave as if we did not, and strive to keep our side in power with all our might. Historically, though, we do not do that. It would be wonderful if we did, though. What if winning made us even more convinced that we needed to put even stronger efforts into the next election cycle, instead of dropping our guards and letting the other side win?

Maybe we can give that some thought. Probably, though, we won't, and things will swing right again. Pity!

On another note that is completely off-topic but ironic in a similar way, my wife and a couple of her friends took me out to dinner last night to celebrate. Who chose the restaurant? One of my wife's friends, who said, "Let's go to my favorite restaurant!" So, we went there. It was an expensive steak house near our new home. Funny thing was, only the woman who suggested that restaurant ordered a steak. I had salmon. My wife ordered a pasta dish and a salad, and the other woman ordered a seafood salad.

Nobody asked me what restaurant was my favorite. That's OK, but I found it amusing that our expensive steakhouse dinner had only one steak ordered in a group of four. I just smiled and ate my salmon, which was very good, while I considered the irony of it.