Change Can Be Hard
Posted on January 3, 2017
They got rid of the basketball court at the health club at my gym next door.
I bitterly resisted. I asked our local Councilman to weigh in, reasoning that the health club was housed at an old school and that the court served a public good.
I don’t think he lifted a finger. If he did, he was ineffective.
The basketball court is now gone, to be replaced by a multi-purpose room to be used by trainers, who charge by the hour I assume, and their clients.
Change sometimes really sucks.
The Pastor at our church told us last month that he was leaving to go work for the Archdiocese. He was advanced in age, and he was a one-man operation and our Catholic Church on the Hill is very active.
We liked him a lot. He replaced a younger Pastor who we also really liked a lot, who also went to work for the Archdiocese.
Change sometimes can be really disappointing.
The principal at my son’s school announced that she was leaving at the end of the school year. She has done a wonderful job in turning the school around and she will leave a legacy of hope and promise in her wake.
But she and her husband are leaving for a new opportunity elsewhere.
Change can both be exciting and understandable.
The new Congress is being sworn in today.
The new Majority, which is the same majority but with some different members, decided to make some changes to the Office of Congressional Ethics.
That office is extremely unpopular with Members on both sides of the aisle because it has become a weapon for outside groups to cause mischief with their campaigns. It can also be expensive for Members to hire up outside lawyers to defend themselves from scurrilous charges.
That doesn’t mean that the changes to this outside office will be easily accepted by the voters. Unfortunately, most Americans have a dim view of the political class and they blithely assume those most politicians are corrupt.
It’s not a fair assumption but it has become conventional wisdom.
Changing the Office of Congressional Ethics is politically perilous if done in a partisan matter, no matter how justified the changes may be.
Change can be dangerous.
Later this month, Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as our new President.
Many Americans simply can’t wrap their heads around this fact. Democrats, liberals, some Republicans, even some conservatives, did everything in their power to stop Trump but to no avail.
Unfortunately for them, they didn’t take Trump seriously enough during the campaign, assuming that the status quo would win out.
When it became clear that Trump had won the electoral count convincingly, they tried to do a recount. When that didn’t work, they tried to turn the electoral college. When that didn’t work, they tried to delegitimize his victory, pointing out that he lost the popular vote by three million (a pointless fact that means nothing in our system of government). Now they are trying to say that it was Vladimir Putin who actually manipulated the voting system and is the real reason we have Trump.
None of that matters.
Trump will be our next President.
Sometime change is inevitable.
The new President is expected to make some dramatic changes to how the government works, starting from the very top.
He is not going to do things the same way that President Obama did them, or President Bush for that matter.
But that is to be expected. President Obama did things much differently than his predecessors too.
Much of that change of direction will be resisted by the bureaucracy.
If there is one thing that is certain in government, it is the fact that the bureaucrats will resist change.
It will be interesting to see how Mr. Trump and his appointees will navigate that reality.
Change sometimes can be hard.