take ball and go home?
nope! won’t bother to show up
and play in the game

A few years ago I met up with a friend of mine who had been a basketball coach of a High School team.

He had left coaching since we had last seen each other and I asked if he missed it.

He thought about it.

Then he said, nope, didn’t miss it one bit.

He said it was all different lately.

He said he could handle the having to talk to kids into coming out for the team.

He said he could handle the not knowing what kind of team he might have at the start of the season.

He said he could handle the kids who thought they were stars.

He said he could handle the kids who argued about practice and playing time.

He said he could handle the kids who argued about having to practice.

He said he could handle the kids who wouldn’t show up for practice.

He said he got to used to the idea that he never really knew who might show up at practice.

But, he said, that he never even knew what kind of team he would have at game time, that he never even knew who might show up for a game, that was the thing he could not get used to.

Forget about getting mad and taking their ball and going home.

These kids wouldn’t bother to show up and play in the game.

I was thinking about that and the changes in High School sports today.

I was thinking about that but what it made me think about was the United States House of Representatives.

There are a lot of things going on in the world today and the House has voluntarily removed themselves from the equation.

In an Opinion Essay in the New York Times, Newt Gingrich Called Them ‘Cannibals.’ Now They Decide Who Gets to Be Speaker of the House, by Nicole Hemmer, a historian who studies the rise of right-wing media and the Republican Party, Ms. Hemmer wrote about the 1995 Government shutdown that, “A nonfunctioning government suited them just fine; after all, wasn’t that the end goal of their antigovernment politics?”

A nonfunctioning government seems to be what we gots.

A nonfunctioning government that suits some members of the House of Representatives just fine.

Without a Speaker that house cannot function.

A nonfunctioning house that suits some members of the House of Representatives just fine.

How can you have Government when members of a branch of the Government wants to sit this one out?

They aren’t going to take their ball and go home.

They aren’t even going to show up for the game.

One such Representative said he did not plan to vote for the Republican’s choice for Speaker as the process was going to fast!

According to Walter Lord, author of the famous A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic that passengers stood on the deck of the sinking ship and called out to people in the lifeboats to make sure they got a pass as they would not be allowed back on board without a pass.

Some of the awfulness of the story of the Titanic is how many of the stories that are true.

For example, it is true that within 10 minutes of hitting the iceberg, the feller who oversaw the design and building of the ship figured out what happened and told Captain Smith that if lucky, they had about 2 hours before the ship went down.

Less time than it takes to watch that block buster James Cameron movie.

Two hours to fill what lifeboats they had.

Two hours to get what people they could off the ship.

But people stood on the deck and advised folks in the lifeboats they better get a pass.

They better get a pass because when this was all over, they couldn’t get back on the ship without a pass.

I recently saw a headline that it was time to bring back Shop Class and Home Ec so that kids learned some basic life skills, like making a scrambled egg or changing a light bulb, before they left school.

Better add Government Class to the list as well.