There are tipping points in the natural world and similar events in the world of humankind. With the change of the calendar date, we now find ourselves looking toward the end of this new month, and the impending arrival of Autumn. There are all sorts of changes contained on the calendar as we get through the Labor Day ceremony, the possible resumption of school and enormous new laws.

The Piedmont is taking the passage of the remnants of Hurricane Ida with aplomb. Rain last night, a period of relative quiet in the morning. The details on generator installation are being taken care of by two men we have not seen before, who are “running a line from the propane tank to the box,” is how one of them put it, and the imminent arrival of a County inspector to mark “compliant” on the last work. If it is, of course, and we support that. With an initial propane delivery, the project will be complete.

Naturally, there is another storm in progress. That one is has a lot of us stalking about on the way to the Loading Dock recreation area. Our President is managing his leadership by committee, whoever is part of it, and the mess at the end of the Afghan adventure is the subject of some discussion by those who served in parts of the twenty-year adventure there. The first calls for Presidential resignation began to ring out this week. We will see how the media complex sees fit to cover it. The bigger storm than the ones involving dying hurricanes and backup generators is on pause for legislative reasons.

The natural storms were used as cover for the biggest one, the gigantic budget omnibus that lurched through the House on their brief recall from summer recess. There are echoes of the creation of the Affordable Care Act, the gigantic take-over of a tenth of the American economy. There was no particular discussion on that one, either. Speaker Pelosi told her Members they had to pass it to find out what was in it. It damaged the Obama Presidency, but was a step of such magnitude that those in power considered it worthwhile. Now we have the same process in motion to fundamentally change the way our government operates.

The Framers discussed many of these issues long ago, and our Constitution limited their new Federal Government to specific itemized authorities. We appear to have arrived at a place where discussion is not permitted and the Constitution ignored when convenient for the imposition of legislation not open to question, much less public discussion.

With all the talk about the end of the twenty-year American component of the Afghan War, I went back to look at how Socotra House felt about 2001. Before the airplanes flew into the towers and all the events that followed. The President had one of his uneasy public appearances yesterday. He appeared a little querulous with us, the people not permitted to read the language contained in the “once in a generation” level of change he insists on implementing as law before any discussion on legislation with a sticker-price of $5 Trillion dollars, and some unseen linkages to new programs that could bring the real price to $7 Trillion.

Just as a matter of perspective, the old complete number of the Federal budget was about $4.5 Trillion, and we are about to see a struggle in the Senate over a number so vast that the old system of committee review is no longer necessary. Our legislators just pass things to find out what is in them, and our media reports what they deem appropriate for us to know.

It is quite a change from the way things worked for a long time. The Writer’s Section at Socotra House is bemused that the magnitude of what is proposed is so complex that it can’t be debated, and so fundamental that it must be done immediately.

We took a poll of everyone who happened to be huddled under the tarpaulin rigged off the end of the Loading Dock. No one could recall a crisis before the pandemic that would cause any of this frantic activity. While our poll may contain a certain cognitive bias, it is based on having been part of the leviathan we are casually enhancing.

There will be more, of course. We had a second question on the poll: “Will this be a September to remember?” The answer was unanimous.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com