Have you ever wondered how much of life is taken up with basic routines? Some of them change around the margins over the years for a variety of reasons, and some remain the same. For example, how we put ourselves together with hair, makeup, and clothes may change, but does the process of brushing one’s teeth ever alter even a whit?
Now think about where we go. There’s pretty much a beaten path to everything from the grocery store and the gas station to the nail salon and our favorite restaurants. I’ve pretty much reduced the routes to all my usual destinations to the least traveled ones through the most attractive areas to alleviate the tedium of driving to the same place for the umpteenth time. It may not be everyone else’s beaten path, and that is precisely the point.
In the office years, it was back and forth, morning and afternoon, rain or shine, hot or cold. Whether it was five miles to downtown or those four years working out by the airport (just over fifty miles roundtrip every day), it was just the next routine after using the toothbrush, the hairbrush, and the powder brush.
I suspect a whole bunch of folks can look back and see all the various routines they were associated with to keep the basic parts of life rolling forward without significant interruption. It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could do it while rearing children.
Nowadays, I’m pretty much through with the beaten path and more into the path of least resistance. It may not be the most direct, and it may take longer to get there. But if I can avoid the freeway, that’s how I’m going.
But these beaten paths that we so often fall back on aren’t just about squeezing Pepsodent on a brush. When I‘m getting ready to go out and about and turn on the news to find out what’s going on in the big wide world, there’s another path on offer that I am determined to beat.
It’s the doom and gloom crowd on cable news, across the ideological spectrum. Now I have been gay for a really long time, and I’ve known a whole lot of drama queens. I must clarify that all drama queens are not gay; in fact, I’ve known some straight men and women who are decidedly drama queens. It’s just that gay drama queens are likely to do it with more panache and will frequently spread their drama all over social media.
But these cable news folks are something else. From MS NOW to CNN to Fox, there are on-camera personalities that fall just short of self-immolation by fire, but only because they’re not really sacrificing themselves at all. To be sure, not all of them do it, but those who do probably would have become actors had they been attractive enough to make it in Hollywood.
So I’m not taking the invitation to their beaten path. Give me the path of least resistance provided by simply changing the channel to TCM.
It seems like it’s oh-so-important to keep up with all this stuff, particularly as we approach the midterms. For the real grassroots activists, it is. These are the folks who knock on doors, do phone banks, and strategically offer their money where it will do the most good. For all the other voters, particularly those who already know how they are going to vote, reviewing the current craziness in the news is less germane and more academic.
That said, it is true that the midterms do offer an opportunity for a rebalancing of power at all levels of government, although most folks will be watching for any meaningful shift in Washington. Please notice that word parsing. I did not say there would be a rebalancing, only the opportunity for such.
Could the majority actually swing in either chamber (or both) to give the Democrats that opportunity? Absolutely. If given the chance, could Democrats under current leadership squander that opportunity? Not if they avoid the path of least resistance, which H. G. Wells would no doubt have considered “the path of the loser” in this case. But if they don’t resist? Well, I will myself fall back on following the path of least resistance by remembering that I was taught it’s not nice to speak ill of people.
In public.
