A note on governing

A short rant.  I have been doing a slow burn over the last several months whenever I hear Congresspeople talk about "how hard we are working" and "how tough our decisions are" as they consider budgetary issues in their legislative sessions.  If they want to think how hard work really is, consider the jobs of nurses, housekeepers, transporters, respiratory therapists, lab technicians, and others in clinical settings.  If they want to think how tough decisions are, consider the ones that have to be made in real time by intensivists, surgeons, oncologists and other doctors.

Not to mention how hard it is for normal people, in all walks of life, to get by day to day.  Or how tough their decisions are.  Check out the the two stories below for a view of that, one, an immigrant intent on serving his country, and the other, a person who inadvertently discovered that he had stage four kidney cancer.

No, dear legislators, you do not have it hard or tough.  You often seem to be making it harder on yourself by maintaining unreasonable and extreme positions, and by forgetting that a key component of governing is learning to compromise for the greater good.  Our system of government was designed by John Adams and all those really smart people to have checks and balances.  That is the best way to insure that minority rights are protected.  What is going on in Washington right now is a serious and dangerous perversion of those principles.