Droopy Plant

Back when I had my own apartment, I had some houseplants. One of them was a Peace Lilly, which is basically the plant equivalent of a goldfish. Cool looking, easy to take care of, given away as prizes at creepy county fairs, etc. I tried to water everything once a week or so, but naturally, I sometimes got distracted by one of the myriad shiny objects I keep in my shiny object collection (my favorite is a a chunk of stained glass from the first Christian Porn Shop, destroyed by eunuchs in 120 AD). When this happened, my plant would get sad, brown, and droopy, much like my ass after a night of booze and Taco Bell. The nice thing about a Peace Lilly is that they're very easy to revive. Water it, and it perks right back up. It got to be much easier to simply wait for it to start drooping before bothering to water it.

This is how public policy progresses in the United States. Rational, deliberate, proactive problem solving is beyond the grasp of our political institutions. We have to wait until something is sad and droopy before there is enough incentive for politicians to bother filling up their watering cans.

I didn't start out trying to make this analogy...I just started thinking about my plant and had to figure out some way to justify writing about it. I was also considering making an analogy to the droopy state of my life, or to my likely ill-fittedness to parenthood, but I'll stick with the political analogy.