My friend wrote a separate email to me to thank me for offering to help her with sending out group emails. "Of course, I’ll help," I thought and I wrote back to her, "It’s what we do." I’ve said this to people in the past, and within the last year, I’ve gotten some push back. I’ve also said, "We don’t do that," when the argument came to lying, breaking into the Capitol building and spitting on things, or being mean in government like we are being mean in the past year… I might say, "Americans are better than that; Americans don’t do that." What I am expressing is what I think are ingrained values, norms, even ‘institutions’. When I was a small child I think I was taught "this is what we do, this is polite, this is the rule." And we obeyed. When I became a teenager, and I began to sneak around…. it was accompanied with my own guilt and (I was misbehaving due to personal anger against parents). My girlfriends who knew about my sneaking called it "Irish guilt or Catholic guilt." And we laughingly said, "Susie, you need to go to confession….. "
Sometimes when I’m alone, I leave CNN on … one time I watched Sully Sullivan land a plane on the Hudson. Another time, I watched a plane fly into the World Trade Center… So if alone, CNN plays in the background. So guess what an announcer said today…. "The previous administration was precedent shattering;" "the end of shame," ignoring subpoenas indicates "basic norms are being shattered." It went on, but this was enough. Shattering precedent and norms, ignoring institutions and law? And, so what? Ignore the legalities. Run out the clock.
At the very end of a football game the quarterback can "end the game" by taking a knee 4 times and running something like 2 minutes off the clock. It happened in the last Buccaneers football game. The Bucs scraped out a 2 point lead, but there was plenty of time for the opposition to score if that "knee rule or knee precident" wasn’t in place. So the great quarterback Brady, very capapable of playing, took 4 knees. "He ran out the clock and ended the game". Is this the way we play life now? If we delay long enough… We will run out the clock and the other guy won’t get a chance to play? Time to get back to paperwork my friends, and let the world play in the background. God bless us. Angels with us.