I had lunch last week with my Airplane Girls. As is true with any group of friends, each of us is going through something in our lives that upends the status quo and forces change that we aren’t particularly comfortable with. One woman just passed the year anniversary of losing her beloved husband, recently sold the large home they lived in and is in the process of moving to a smaller place. Another’s husband has health issues brought on by an adverse reaction to the COVID vaccine, and an adult daughter who will probably be affected by the DOGE processes that seem to be moving forward at lightning speed. And me, I just got another suspicious mammogram report and will have to go through the process of determining the cause, extent, and resolution of the suspected abnormality.
We got to talking about those changes that are coming in our own lives, and that morphed into a discussion of change in general. Though we are of the same political bent, we had differing opinions about the advisability of the methods and processes of what’s happening to affect change in the federal government.
Regardless of political persuasion, I think we can agree that the government and culture of the United States is a mess. Who can say they’re proud of what the United States of America is in 2025? What to do about it, though, is a bone of contention and the root cause for the great political divide in our society.
There are two things I keep thinking about as I listen to both sides of the argument for what may be a possible solution.
First is my life-long belief and MO (modus operandi) that if you want something to change, you have to change something. In life, change is often forced upon us making us just along for the ride. We hang on and pray we come out on the other side alive and well. But I’ve learned that if there’s something about my life I just don’t like, or feel is not quite right or could be better, I must be proactive and courageous and initiate a change that moves me closer to my desired outcome. Sometimes there’s collateral damage, people whose feelings are hurt, or the adjustment of a situation that may not be as advantageous for someone else.
So, first and foremost, in terms of the government and culture of the USA in 2025 being a mess, something must change. Maintaining the status quo won’t fix the malaise we’re in. That point is inarguable.
The second thing I keep thinking about is the old adage about ripping the band-aid off. AI (which apparently is the new expert on everything) says ripping the band-aid off “is an idiom that means to confront a difficult or unpleasant change quickly and decisively, accepting the initial shock or pain to move forward with the change as soon as possible, rather than dragging it out and prolonging the discomfort; essentially, facing a tough situation head-on to minimize the overall negative impact.”
Whether ripping the band-aid off is a good idea or not certainly is arguable, but I’ve always been of the mind that I’d rather get the unpleasantness behind me so I can move forward to the situation I think will be an improvement. It makes no sense to me to prolong the agony. I understand not everyone agrees with that approach, and that a slower change process is far more comfortable for most people. But in my experience, a slower change process provides far more opportunity to become complacent again and stop moving forward. If the change must occur, I’m all for moving forward quickly and just do what needs to be done to make the best future possible.
What we Airplane Girls agreed to do is to mark the day we met for lunch (February 27, 2025) and note what the world (macro, micro, and global) we live in looks like. Then, a year from now we’ll meet again to evaluate what has changed, how we felt about it, whether it’s good change or not, how the process of change that was chosen worked positively or negatively, and whether or not we’re better off on all three of those levels than we were a year ago.
That whole exercise seems a little incongruous to three women in the 4th quarter of their lives. I mean, there are those who’d wonder why we, at our age, care about anything outside the comfortable little retirement bubble we live in. And I suppose that’s a fair question.
I can’t speak for my two friends, but I believe in truth, justice, and the American Way, meaning the day-to-day life our Founding Fathers envisioned when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States of America. I believe the federal government, as founded and outlined in the Constitution, only legitimately has 8 functions. They are managing foreign affairs, providing national defense, regulating interstate commerce, coining money, establishing a postal system, declaring war, raising and maintaining an armed force, and overseeing the federal judiciary system. I believe money corrupts and power corrupts absolutely. The federal government has too much money at their disposal. That money translates to power over We, the People. As a result, the federal government is corrupted to its core. I believe the federal government (and the state and local governments, too!) has too much control over my day-to-day life and I want that to change. I do not want to continue to live in free-range slavery as I wrote about in last week’s blog about tax season.
So, join me and my 2 friends in marking the conditions of life this week, and comparing them a year from now. For the record, at Walmart this morning in Englewood, Florida, eggs are $6 a dozen, gas is $2.95 a gallon, and I’m paying income tax on social security and military retirement income. Auto and homeowners insurance premiums are out of control, we don’t know for sure whether there’s any gold in Fort Knox, you can’t trust whether anything you hear in the media is factual or is propaganda, and there are volatile hot spots simmering toward world war in the Middle East and Ukraine. Human beings are more chronically sick than they’ve ever been in history, childhood disease runs rampant. Despite billions and billions (and billions) of dollars in research over the last 50 dollars, we don’t have any official hope of curing cancer, and we haven’t sent a manned mission to the moon since 1972.
America seems hopeless.
See you next year for that annual check-up on day-to-day life on a micro, macro, and global scale.
P.S. Today is Randy’s 73rd birthday. Join me in wishing him a great day, and a much better year going forward than it’s been in the recent past. He doesn’t like this free-range slavery gig either. Though he’d be happy if the HOA would just stop telling him what he can and can’t do on his own property.
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