I'm no mechanic, just an old bodger who's making do with a bunch of old equipment that's twenty years past the point where its too worn down to function.
One of the things I like about puttering around with machines is that with enough patience and persistance we can take a big unsolvable disaster, break it down into a number of small resolvable problems, take those on one at a time and have the satisfaction of hearing a seized engine start up and run.
Usually you try the simple stuff first, You change the oil, the gas, the plug and the filters, charge the battery, take things apart and tinker with them, tighten up what's loose, loosen whats tight, adjust the tolerances
I'm hoping thats going to be the story with healthcare, the economy, global warming, GITMO and all the rest of it, but for me today it was my aging but indestructable clunkers that breathed new life.
My thesis here is that political machines work a lot like old cars. You can trade in your clunkers or you can fix em up and keep em running. Maybe its good for the economy to swap them out, but there is nothing like watching the sun set on a long day and hearing an old engine roar to life.
I'm concerned that we have a lot to do, not much time to do it and not much is getting done. The problem seems to be the engine is all seized up and I'm wondering how we fix that
The thing about a seized engine is that if you can turn it even just a little you can maybe get it to start and if you can get it to start you can make a big problem smaller. You can take the spark plug out to reduce the compression and make moving it easier, you can rotate it to break the lock and after you have engaged in a little spin the whole thing can loosen up.
Maybe there is a moral there maybe not but its starting to look like the economy, and healthcare, and our entanglement in foreign wars and even GITMO are slowly but surely turning around.
I'm still kinda worried about how we are gonna handle global warming. I was figuring maybe we could begin to make some hard choices before our emmissions reached 450 ppm, now its looking like the right target would have been 350 ppm and we are already at 385.
My sense is that the difference between success and failure is often just being too stuborn to give up.