Age gets to you worse when you're old.
Young people don't feel it so bad for some reason. Driving
especially gets increasingly aggravating with the passing years. A stiff
neck and failing eyes make it difficult to check traffic; a bad knee makes it
hard to accelerate; foot cramps belabor stopping.
An arthritic middle finger is a real handicap in traffic.
Getting old is much like politics. By the time you figure it
out, you're pretty worn down from the effort of surviving. Where youthful
energy and enthusiasm once propelled you into the fight with confidence and
cheer, you become less sure of some things and more sure of others, an inverse
relation that sometimes troubles your mind but usually lets you get to sleep at
night with a clear conscience.
Not cheating is the easy part. The hard part is getting
something worthwhile done without compromising your back – er, your scruples –
and wondering if things really are gonna work out okay in the morning.
Hardest of all is working with Democrats, who simply refuse to look
reality in the eye while clinging desperately to their guns and Bibles teenagerish
notions of how the world should work. After they have power for a few
years, you wonder if it'll ever again be safe to drive through Washington, D.C.
after hours. Bet on it: it won't.
It isn't so much that they lie, cheat, steal, and probably kill,
but rather that they insist that they are the good guys.
They'll look you square in the eye and shrilly demand to know by what
vile right you claim to stand for the helpless innocent. By this they
mean fetuses, or feti, or babies, as some of us call them. The language
changes almost daily when liberals get in demand mode, wearing out your hearing
aid and making you glad to stagger back to chambers where you can pretend to
study gobbledygook passed off as legislation.
Way back in 1976, Bob Dole ran for president. Famous for his
wit, Dole related how somebody asked why he even wanted the job.
"Well," said the senator, "it's inside work and no heavy
lifting." I liked Bob Dole back then, before I ever heard the phrase
"Deep State" or knew what Robert Mueller would turn out to be.
Things worked back then. I could shoot hoops, run for miles, and
have confidence that Bob Dole was busy working for the greater good, working
for me and mine, a Kansas man working for a Kansas boy.
I'm no longer so sure that Dole really was doing that. Part
of the reason for that doubt is that I've lost confidence in the judgment of
George Will, who once told us Bob Dole was a legislative giant. But now
George Will, in his Little Lord Fauntleroy suits and bowtie, throws rocks at
Donald Trump, the one man in high politics since Ronald Reagan who makes sense
to me. Will dissed Reagan, too.
Maybe I'm too dumb to grasp Will, who isn't all that much older
than I but who has an impressive string of degrees from impressive
institutions. He really is an intellectual, and at one time I enjoyed his
stuff. But now he's become a #NeverTrump troll so that today I have no
confidence that Bob Dole ever was what I once thought he was, and George Will
should stick to baseball.
Maybe I just never did really understand Will. Or Dole.
But you make do with what you got. Age has sharpened my political
insight while dimming my physical eyesight. I see Donald Trump returning
America to what she once was – a country going places, doing things, standing
for something great – and wonder how anybody can take seriously all the
negative junk.
Methinks the left has simply gotten old faster even than I did,
and the #NeverTrump faction perhaps even faster than the left. All I know
on Earth, and all I need to know, is that when I see them marching with their
signs, all raggedy and filthy and dirty-mouthed and boorish, I really do feel
the pain in that arthritic finger.
