Via Thomas Sowell I find this…

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Rings true, doesn’t it? If we accept that statement as true, who was the last politician who actually tried to help people? Harry Truman is famous for saying that he didn’t give ‘em hell, he just told the truth and they thought it was hell. I am not one to demand logical consistence, being given to illogical beliefs myownself, but why would a sane, reasonable person with a loving family and a healthy supply of common and uncommon sense ever deliberately offer him/her/itself up for public office? You can’t tell the truth and get elected, and if you get elected by lying either directly or by omission to what end have you sacrificed your honor?

Perhaps that explains the behavior of so very many elected types; perhaps they simply have no honor. Or, more likely, the fact that I have some rudimentary concept of personal honor is just one more example of why I am a man of an earlier time, unsuited for modern society. It is a Thug Life sort of world in which we live, and if you expect to survive I suppose you’d best be getting all thuggy.

A relative in her ninth decade decided that she’d had enough; she had outlived her contemporaries, her family, and all her old friends. She was a woman who had that iron will necessary to do so, so she starved herself to death. When we cleaned out her home we found a fully stocked pantry. Each passing year brings me closer to an understanding of her reasoning. Sometimes the world changes so drastically that you simply refuse to make the necessary adaptations, and so perish.