I Can't Believe I'm Actually Going to Say This but...

I spent a rather good sized chunk of my life being discontent.  I think it started when I was in middle school.  I started to distrust teachers and authority figures of various types.  For most of that time I seemed to suffer from a sort of delusion that I always knew better than whoever was running the show.  To be fair, no one who was running the show did so with any great skill or the sort of inspirational verve of a Roosevelt or a Churchill.  Politicians seemed as dim and ineffective as my high school guidance counselors or the managers at the supermarket where I worked.  By the time I was in college I had started to develop a serious case of proletarian idealism, in which I, and people that I deemed to be in my crowd, were the only sane beings in a world that had basically lost it's ever loving mind.
Bob Dylan actually describes this phenomenon quite well in his song My Back Pages. That was pretty much twenty year old me.  And the problem with twenty year old me, to put it very simply and avoid many of the gory details, was that I had no idea how to lead, or to parent, or to teach, or to administrate, or really do anything other than manage to feed and bathe myself (and I didn't even do that particularly well). Yet I had ideas, important ideas, passionate ideas about what was right and wrong, and "how things ought to be."
I can still get that way from time to time, but I'm trying to be different.
So, (deep sigh), I think I owe John Boehner an apology.  I think I was too busy making fun of his orange-ish complexion and the fact that he so resembled the caricature of a politician and that his general ideology was not like my own, that I did not recognize him as a human being.  I started to feel a little bad for him about the time that Ted Cruz really came on the scene, just a twinge, because I recognize in Ted Cruz the sort of uncompromising ideologue that can bring just about any democratically organized system to a grinding halt.
When Boehner would make a (sort of) attempt to work with the Democrats, Cruz and his ilk would squawk about the ruination of the constitution and try to shut down the whole mess.  I guess over the course of the past few years I have come to the realization that perhaps the only thing worse than a politician who constantly acts like a politician is a politician who refuses to engage in the good faith exercise of politics.  Tricky stuff this.
I'm beginning to recognize the tendency, and to call it adolescent is perhaps a disservice to adolescents, in American politics.  I recognize it because I was an adherent of it at one time in my life.  It is quite simply a manifestation of narcissism that refuses to compromise an ideological position even for it's own good, sort of like congress shutting down the government because they don't want to pass a reasonable budget.  The far right of the Republican Party is steadily alienating the masses of people. It's one thing if you're obstinate and uncooperative with a Democratic President, it's entirely another thing if you're that way with your own duly elected Speaker of the House.
I saw John Boehner crying as Pope Francis addressed congress and called them to start acting like grown ups and do the job they were elected to do, and I thought to myself, "hey that guy is a human being after all."  As it turns out Boehner has a bit of  reputation for getting misty, and the enemies within his own constituency count it as one of his many weaknesses.
Personally, I count it as a moral defect to judge someone for being moved to tears, it's something that twenty year old me would have done.
Boehner resigned a few days later, not because people made fun of him, but because he realized that his tenure as Speaker of the House had become ineffective and essentially untenable.
Our nation, hell our species, faces some serious challenges going forward.  We cannot continue to listen to the delusional narcissism of those who hold extreme positions and who are willing to terrorize the rest of us into appeasing them.  Yes, that is strong language, and yes, that is what they are doing.  Moderates may not be the most exciting folks out there.  They may not be as galvanizing in their rhetoric or as sure of their methods, but they are the people we need to steer this ship away from the rocks.  The root of the word politic is the Greek word Polis, which means city and implies a community.  The implication of politics is to serve the community, to lead based on what is good for the greatest number of people.  That means that a few may always find you problematic.
Sometimes your enemies define you rather more accurately than your friends.  If a politician offends the powerful, if he draws venom from the ideologues that are pulling us to the edges of things, if he makes decisions that are unpopular with those who deal in fear and anger, he may just be someone we want in charge.
Was John Boehner a person like that?  I can't really judge that now, but I do apologize for making fun of him, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.