With one thing and another, age tires you out and drains your energy. Driving especially gets 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 fray 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.
The hardest thing is working with Democrats, who simply refuse to look reality in the eye while clinging desperately to their 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 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.
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 of the “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 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 is a bona fide 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. 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.
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