Oiling the Locomotive

America once had institutions to buffer against sociopolitical friction. The destruction of these institutions is raising temperatures and increasing wear as we head toward system failure.

I’m trained as a mechanical engineer, so forgive me if I tend to think in engineering terms.

Growing up on a farm down in Mississippi, I had my RFME (Rural Farm Mechanical Engineering) degree by the time I was old enough to drive our farm truck to the Union County Co-Op to pick up a load of fertilizer, feed or seed (Mississippi, at the time, allowed 13 year-olds to operate farm equipment).

That degree, which many of my contemporaries hold, is largely based around keeping things moving that are designed to move and keeping things that are not designed to move in place.

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When you design equipment, you are always looking for wear points, the places where two moving pieces intersect or interact. When moving pieces are pitted against each other, they often create friction - heat and wear - and failure ensues. As the failure progresses, it often takes more power and energy loads to get the equipment to perform its designed function. We often monitor temperature and/or loads on electrical motors to detect wear, especially when the wear is occurring in hard-to access areas (like deep inside a complex machine or at the bottom of the ocean).

If friction goes on long enough, there comes a time when the overall equipment fails.

We try to avoid that.

We do it by using bearings, bushings, slides, and lubricants -  all sorts of things that help avoid friction and wear.

Those things could be defined as “buffers”, these are intermediaries that are designed to take the wear and tear to save the rest of the equipment. Some, like bearings, are designed to last for the life of the machines but there are some, like bushings, are designed to be replaced over prescribed periods of time.

One could make the analogy that America is like a great machine with two major sides that must work together for the good of the country. One could also argue that the current heat, friction, and heavy loads of passion that are being emitted across the landscape is due to the erosion, or in some cases, the absolute absence of any buffers designed to allow the two forces to work together.

In most cases, these “buffers” tend to be institutions.

Academia was once one. It was a place where ideas could be discussed and debated in an environment of learning. People listened, considered, refuted and formed their own opinions based on reasoned debate in a place where access to an infinite amount of stored knowledge and access to important thinkers existed.

Today, those institutions no longer exist. The UnWoke need not apply.

Religion was one as well. Based on the Judeo-Christian tenets of right and wrong, the blessings of forgiveness and the idea we should “love the sinner, not the sin”, this was a place for spiritual healing and reconciliation bounded by commonly agreed morals and beliefs.

Today, both Christians and Jews are attacked for their beliefs and boundaries. They are called bigots, racists, pretty much every name in the book and at every turn are discouraged, if not outright prohibited, from sharing their beliefs in public.

Congress, like a hybrid of academia and religion, was once a place where the good of the nation mattered. It was where people from all political angles worked together to create something good for all Americans – or at least sought to do the least harm to the fewest people possible.

That congress is long dead. Today, the US Congress is a body that only knows how to play a zero sum, “I win, you lose” game. It is brinkmanship 24/7/365 with only breaks to raise enough money to keep the arguments going. Almost without exception, when something happens that is “bipartisan”, it is usually bad for most Americans rather than good, at least for the ones who foot the bill.

The courts were another. These were places where justice was blind and everybody, regardless of social status or economic status could find equal treatment under the law. Lady Justice was still blindfolded and her scales were balanced.

No more. There are clearly two sets of legal standards for the rich, the powerful and the politically connected and those who are not. J6 prosecutions and persecutions prove that. The completely politicized and weaponized Department of Justice just charged a doctor who tried to render aid to Ashli Babbitt with four misdemeanors.

Like mechanical equipment, the more these buffers erode without attention to replace or properly manage them, the hotter the moving pieces become.

And it wouldn’t be so aggravating if this was just normal wear and tear – but it isn’t. Today there are people intentionally pouring sand in the gears and willfully ignoring the sound of grinding, the increase in temperature and the extra load on the motive devices of this nation.

And it is all due to the destruction of the buffers.

Once there were people who understood the moving parts of the American locomotive needed constant attention.

It seems that time has passed.