What Do We Expect?

Dear Editor,

This is the week for nostalgia and goal setting.  Memories can make us smile or bring us to tears.  Anticipation can be exciting or dread-filled.  In the case of political action in the most powerful country in the world, it can be felt by everyone, everywhere.  The goals of the American people, and our determination, are much in our own hands, if we can grasp it, and race to the finish line.

What do we expect?  There is a theory that we set ourselves up by our own expectations.

Our current situation, as citizens of a once-respected country, might match the opening of an old TV series - Death Valley Days.  We are shown a desert, and a team of stubborn animals insisting on one destination.  Their animal instinct tells them that their best answer is “over that aways”.

“Death Valley Days” was sponsored by 20-Mule-Team-Borax.  The suggestion was that you most likely had some really dirty clothes, and Borax could get them clean. The music (reportedly written by Lawrence Welk) has a pounding beat, which fit the video of pack animals, driven by an innate sense that just over there was a safe place with all they needed.  The audio stops when the mules get where they need to go.  Water was the mindless goal of those stubborn mules.  

Like water, democracy is essential to life as we understand it, but not guaranteed.  A government built on the principle of a free people continually creating a place that is open to all people, where each person has rights as well as a job to do, can be a driving source of energy.

What do we anticipate?  What do we wish for?

Deb Morton’s letter of last week listed all that might be wrong in our world, the feeling that we are scrambling across an unforgiving desert, AND Deb suggested that the people do have the power, if we team up and choose to use it.

The theory is that we set ourselves up according to our own expectations.

Do we have the determination to reach the goal of a saved and refurbished democracy?  What does that Democracy look like?  We can choose our future and how much we are willing to strive to make it the best it can be. 

We can make this coming New Year of 2026 as much as it can be, in every aspect of a community of living souls.

Let’s do that – make it the best.  Now, if we could only agree on what is “best”.

Lola R. Gregg

Mineral Point, WI