There's an old photo of a hospital sign floating around online saying "IMPATIENT PARKING ONLY."
It could be a typo for inpatient, an inattentive sign-maker, or a wry comment on long waiting times in hospitals.
Whichever it is, to my eyes the sign captures a dominant theme in our modern American lives: Everyone is in a hurry. Everything must be done immediately. We need that report yesterday. Instant gratification is extremely important, although no one ever really explains why that is. It's just an unquestioned given.
No one ever lay on their deathbed and thought, "Boy, I wish I had rushed to another meeting. I wish I had run to catch that train. If only I had hurried more in my short life."
I admit I have fallen into this lifestyle sinkhole myself at times. Just the other day, in line to attempt a left turn on a busy street, I may have muttered something unkind to a woman in the car in front of me who seemed to be taking a nap while waiting for an engraved invitation to make the turn.
Fact is, I was not in an actual hurry to get somewhere important and to do it urgently. I was returning from an errand and would soon be playing with my extremely patient dog.
So, WTH was going on?
That got me thinking. I was growing up before the middle of the 20th Century. I have no recollection of rushing anywhere for any reason. Highways were two-lane. Some people had dial phones. But you needed an operator to call out of town. We were on a party line. So our conversations had to await the end of everyone else's.
You couldn't really hurry anything. So, you didn't. And it didn't matter.
What is it about the rush of our 21st-century lives? How did so very many things come to be so rushed? And why exactly have we lost the skill of waiting? It's not FedEx's fault; it was simply meeting a commercial need.
That's the mystery in this week's audio commentary. Hurry up and listen. Then, you have to leave your own thoughts below. NOW!
Click on this flag:
This week's Sunday column turned into a warning.
The media would have every single one of us checking their websites every few minutes because Democrats have nothing positive to propose, so they are saying bad things about President Trump, there could be a terror attack somewhere at any moment, and there's an exciting war going on.
News peddled as a consumer product.
The column's warning was that focusing on the loud, individual explosive things that make great video can cause us to miss the commander-in-chief's much larger, grand strategy.
Which, come to think of it, may be an important part of media's grand anti-Trump strategy.
Read what I meant and leave your own thoughts.
The most recent audio commentary heralded the explosion of patriotism and U.S. flag pride emanating largely from the success of our athletes at the recent winter Olympics in Italy, but also the perverse attacks on all that by the left and its media.
They spread stories of many liberals allegedly traumatized by the sight of so many fellow countrymen celebrating the athletic success and the accompanying national pride with that red, white, and blue thing all over the place. Poor babies. You won't believe some of the stories they shared and the obvious flag hate.
Makes you wonder why they don't just leave. But then you realize that would force them to give up their mission of tearing this place down and replacing it with something more to their liking that's not to ours.
Barack Obama called that a necessary goal of "fundamentally transforming" the nation that had just generously elected him on faith as its leader, the good talker with no real executive experience.
