I’m tired. And it’s not just because I am old and worn out. A part of it—perhaps a  large part of it—has to do with the continual argument that invades our space but doesn’t really seem to move our understanding forward. We seem to noisily disagree about nearly everything. It takes up our headspace and frays our nerves, but we still keep doing it.

Take the debt limit crisis, for example. Logically, there should be no debt limit crisis. Raising the debt limit simply says that we are going to pay the bills that the budget (approved by Congress and the president) authorized the government to incur. We agreed to pay the bills when we spent the money.

However, in 1980, the Republicans, thinking that the Federal Trade Commission was enforcing trade regulations too vigorously, decided to withhold funding for the FTC by shutting down the government. By today’s standards, it was a little bitty shutdown: just one day and an estimated cost to the government of $700,000. And it only affected the FTC.

However, like sharks to blood, the Republicans were drawn to the tactic. Since 1980, they (along with occasional Democratic support) have shut down the government nine times. It’s never about money. It’s about priorities. In the past, it has been a protest against taxes, for funding the Contras, against the Affordable Care Act, and for the wall. In the current dust-up, the Republicans propose to cut discretionary spending and cap annual increases at 1%, less than inflation. Discretionary spending includes things like servicemember pay, grants for schools that serve large shares of low-income students, rental assistance to house millions of poor and disabled, and money to fund research on cancer and other life-threatening diseases. They also want to rescind the budget increase for the IRS,  repeal actions taken by President Biden to waive student debt, and repeal clean energy incentives.

Right now, the Republicans are screaming loudly about the debt, ignoring the fact that Biden cut the annual deficit in his first budget by about half from Trump’s last budget.  Prior to the pandemic, Trump’s deficit was about 50% higher than Obama’s last budget. Historically, Democrats have been more fiscally responsible than Republicans. The Republicans just yell louder.

It would be easy to believe that the Republicans are simply following the leader in buying things and threatening not to pay for them. Trump is famous for it. However, this predates Trump and is evidently just a way to hold the country hostage.

Another very tiresome (and very loud) subject is gun control. The gun people don’t want any. The rest of us think that we need to do something about people being shot every day. On this subject, I’m something of a moderate. I don’t want anybody’s guns. I don’t want to keep anybody from owning a gun. But I don’t want a bunch of emotionally stunted men strutting around with a long gun or a Glock on their hip, daring somebody to come get them.

In Georgia, because of the consistent wisdom of our governor, we have a thing called Constitutional Carry. Translated from New Speak, it simply means that pretty much anybody can carry a firearm pretty much anywhere, except where politicians are gathered. The problem I have with Constitutional Carry is that it doesn’t seem to be constitutional at all. I don’t believe that the Second Amendment means what the gun people think it does. In fact, I don’t believe the Second Amendment is about firearms at all. It’s about the states’ right to meet a threat. In the years immediately before the Constitution was ratified and the Bill of Rights was added, state militias had been called out to fight in the revolutionary war, to fight Indian incursions, and to put down Shay’s Rebellion. However, a lot of people—termed anti-Federalists—were concerned that a national standing army would eliminate the militias. James Madison, who didn’t think it was necessary to have a Bill of Rights anyway, decided it would be politically expedient to add one, just to comfort those who were worried about states’ rights and individual liberties. It worked. The constitution was ratified, and Madison was reelected.

He came up with a few proposed amendments to head off the states sending lists of their own, and one of them was what became the Second Amendment. Originally, it said: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, a well-armed and well-regulated militia being the best security of a free county; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person. In other words, the states could still call up men to fight as needed, unless they were conscientious objectors.

When I was young, a lot of people owned guns. With a very few exceptions, they were tools, used for hunting or controlling varmints. We didn’t strap them on to have picture taken for our Christmas cards.

I wish both sides would decide that the desired objective is to make people in our country no more liable to being shot than people in other countries, drop their preconceptions, and bury their straw men. This is a serious problem that is getting worse every day.

Finally, I wish everybody could have spent some time with my mother. A lot of this name-calling would go away. We might have more productive discussions if we could bring actual facts to the table instead of a bunch of juvenile names.

I think it’s my mother’s influence that keeps me from calling people names in internet discussions. I can still remember the consequences.

Once upon a time, we could, despite disagreements, get things done. The constitution was ratified because people, some of whom didn’t like each other very much, decided that a strong constitution that would create a nation respected by other nations was a worthy objective and required that they be willing to compromise. That’s the reason we have the constitution we have today. It is a bundle of compromises between large states and small states, commercial states and agrarian states, free states and slave-holding states. In today’s political climate, we would probably have failed.

And that makes it very tiring to be an American.