Weekend Freewrite: Forty-Four

Change is hard for everyone, I get that ...

Our little organization was 230 or so years old when we elected president no. 44.

The place was in a shambles. Whole bunches of people had made some really bad deals that had come close to causing the whole shebang and the whole local economy to go belly up.

I mean, who sells whatchamadoodles to folks that they KNOW don't have enough money? Who does that?

Who buys whatchamadoodles when they KNOW they don't have enough money? Who does that?

Who figures out a way to make a bunch of money on buying and selling the buying and selling of whatchamadoodles without checking to see if any real money is being actually exchanged? Where do they do that at?

Everywhere around here, apparently, is where they do that at.

So, that was the situation, about the time that everybody had to realize that nothing from nothing STILL leaves nothing and started looking for a savior. No confession of sins, mind you. No open confession of the part we all played in making this mess. Just a savior.

Here came president no. 44 -- young, good-looking, charismatic, smart, DIFFERENT. That's it. His mere presence suggested that things were going to be different now. And, to his credit, he and outgoing president no. 43 worked well enough together to stop the freefall in whatchamadoodle prices so that the local economy at least stopped coming apart at the seams. So, the 230-year history of our organization has now stretched to 240 years or so.

But like I said, we looked for a savior without taking on enough responsibility for our part in the mess. And so, while we are lurching along, we are emphatically still NOT SAVED.

President no. 44 is now former president no. 44 -- and I can't tell you how heartbroken people are about it. Folks begging us to change the organizational rules so he could stay longer, folks writing songs about how much they missed him, building shrines, getting physically ill, protesting over his departure to be replaced by no. 45... it has been quite the process.

President no. 45 has his fans, don't get me wrong. A whole bunch of people felt they needed to be saved from the policies of no. 44, which to their opinion did not really solve the problems they need solved in the organization. I'm not here to argue that point, because just like no. 44 changed to no. 45, no. 45 will someday give way to no. 46, and no. 46 to no. 47, and so forth. Our organization has an election every two years, and a big one every four.

Change is hard for everyone, I get that ...

... but when do WE, THE PEOPLE realize that if our organization is going to change for the better, WE have to change for the better FIRST?

Graphic by Deeann D. Mathews, the author