Recently, I just celebrated my 64^th birthday.

While living on this rock hurling through space at a speed of 67,100 miles per hour, I have lived through 64 earth rotations around the sun. I have witnessed 786 full moons. I’ve seen Haley’s comment once already, and if I’m lucky or cursed, depending on your point of view, I’ll see it again in 2061.

I’ve seen pictures of the universe from many planetary observatories and telescopes in space, like the Hubble and JWST (James West Space Telescope), that show the beauty of what is all there. I’ve also seen the Earth from Voyager 1, which gives us the famous picture sent back showing the vastness of space and that “Pale Blue Dot” we call Earth.

So, when I look at all this interstellar vastness & beauty that God made. Then, I took a hard look at the Earth and its history. I can’t help but think of the Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s quote, “From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

Well said, Edgar…well said indeed!

Because you can’t open a newspaper (assuming anyone actually has a newspaper delivered to their homes anymore), your news app on your phone or tablet, or even turn on your TV to watch the mainstream media either lie or shade the news to boost their ratings or get more sponsors, and realize that we are being governed/ruled/manipulated by overgrown children who seek nothing more than to get their own way in any fashion possible.

To simplify, Our government is nothing more than an elementary school playground. And every so often, new bullies show up and push the old bullies off the swingset while the rest of us are left standing around picking our noses and scratching our asses.

And it doesn’t matter what side of the so-called “aisle” you sit on either. Because power, in and of itself, is temporary. All of the changes one party makes will be undone by the next party that comes into office.

Because every 4 to 8 years (or every two years because of what is called “Mid-Term” elections), the whole focus of the country changes, and then it becomes nothing more than a pissing contest initiated by people we would never allow into our homes or watch our children.

Yet, we actually elect these people to sit in positions of power, who end up doing things we do not want them to do but do anyway because “it is for the good of the country.” Come to think about it, maybe electing these people to office was the wrong phrase. Perhaps it’s more of “picking the lesser of two evils” that we have been reduced to.

Personally, I like some of the changes the current administration is making. Who wouldn’t like saving money and cutting out wasteful spending? You have to admit, a lot of Americans were pissed off when DOGE discovered that we were paying $20 Million to create a Sesame Street type of children’s show in Iraq. Or USAID spending more than $900,000 to a “Gaza-based terror charity” called Bayader Association for Environment and Development and a $1.5 million program slated to “Advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities” that is just the tip of the iceberg.

But then again, there are those “on the other side of the aisle” who look at these programs as “good for the American image” and “look at the people we are helping.” (Honestly, it took everything I had not to puke when I wrote that last sentence.)

I still can’t get out of my mind the last part of the quote by Edgar Mitchell that says…” You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

We must ask ourselves, “What exactly are these people in Washington looking at and thinking?” We have become a country that has no problem throwing money at the issues of other countries and neglecting the ones we have here at home. We have no problem sending our brave men and women in uniform to protect other countries. At the same time, their governments won’t lift a finger to defend themselves or even pay for their own safety. We have become a country that “Plays By The Rules” where our enemies do not have to. Yet, when we retaliate in kind after an attack by our enemies, we are the ones who are made to look like criminals by the very people who not only attacked us in the first place but also by the very same countries we send money to help them in their “social and economic times of trouble.”

We have become a country that has negated the use of common sense, fiduciary responsibility, the basics of biology, the rule of law, the Constitution, the preservation of human life, and parental rights.

We have become a “kindler and gentler” society where everybody gets a trophy whether they win or lose. Thus, we are negating the lessons we learned by failing and not doing the same things again to win. Losing and failure are learning processes.

There are two quotes from Thomas Edison on failure that I particularly like. The first concerned his failures while inventing the lightbulb: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And the 2^nd one was, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

We have politicians who want to give everyone equal results of success without the work, and yes, even failure that goes along with it. Where is the logic in that? A baby has to fall down many times before learning to walk. It is the same with people. People must fall down/fail before learning to walk/succeed.

When you look back at the history of America, we have made mistakes. We’ve had some failures. We’ve done some things we are not proud of, but we accomplished some great things. But we’ve also been guilty of returning to the same failures of the past and trying to “resurrect them” because now “we have different people in charge.”

We have seen what works and what doesn’t. We have seen that, as Americans, we know what we want. We have a pretty good idea of how we want our country to be run. We have a good idea of how our taxes are to be spent, our schools to be run, our borders to be safely guarded, and how our government, courts, and economy should function.

And the funny part is this… we’ve seen it in the past. We’ve seen the success of America, which has made all the rest of the world’s nations stop, drop, and drool over what we’ve been blessed with.

So, why won’t our leaders listen, learn from what didn’t work, and focus more on what did? Because they think they know better than the rest of us “uneducated/non-enlightened thinking morons”! The problem is that they, the new so-called progressive leaders/new bullies on the playground, had never read the words of George Santayana, who wrote in 1905 when he said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

 I believe that if politicians don’t heed the advice of George Santayana regarding what actually works in America and the will of the American People, then they should be subjected to the words of Edgar Mitchell when he said,”‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”