A Cross-Grained People

     I'm still thinking about the recent elections.  They have restored my faith -- not in the essential goodness of the American people, at least half of whom have below-average ethics and morals, but in our cussedness.

     Some years back, or m,ore like some decades back, one or the other party had got themselves a Federal trifecta, and many of the more voluble Senators and Congressthings on the winning side were going on chat shows and talking about a "permanent majority."  Even back then, my immediate reaction was, 
"Nuh-unh."  It doesn't work that way.  Never has, never will.  Oh, sometimes one party holds the upper hand for a good long time, but it doesn't last.  There's a war or an economic downturn or some fundamental change elsewhere in society, and politics gets shaken up.

     The guys who wrote the U. S. Constitution were not perfect men and neither was the document they produced (and they knew it.  Why do you think it's got the amendment process written right in?).  But they read history.  They knew that human nature remains constant, but governments change.  They tried to write around the worst ways of changing but they knew it would happen.  And as people go, Americans are a cantankerous, ornery lot.  We're perverse and uncooperative.  We like to blame the people we voted in to run things, and to vote them out if things aren't going as we'd like.  There's been a lot of back and forth about our 15-bean assortment of a culture, one side saying our diversity is our strength, the other saying our unity is our strength, but both statements are true and the real source of our strength is that we don't fall into line well; we're fractious and taken as a whole, we're very willing to take the bull (or the BS) by the horns and change course.

     I'd about given up.  It looked to me like the bully-boys were going to ride high, wide and mighty until they'd driven the whole shebang over a cliff.  They still might, but the electorate did their best to head it off last Tuesday, whooping and hollering and waving a big bandanna.  We've taken some damage, bit we just might get through this and get back to normal for awhile.

     At least, until next time.  But I'm believing there will be a next time, that the pendulum will keep on swinging, and that's a relief.