CAREFUL PLANNING TAKES TIME

Planning, careful planning, is an essential element to all caring relationships.

Especially the relationship you have with yourself, your inner-world with your inner-voice on a continuous narrative.

‘Let’s do this, then that, but this before that. And only on the weekend.’

What kind of a plan is that, a beer drinker’s weight loss plan?

Nooooooo, but . . .

I’m trying, and failing, to think of a plan that would have enticed me to travel thousands of miles to link up with the Jan 6 insurrectionists.

Would it be an invitation? Nooooo.

Word of mouth? Nooooo.

My moral guide telling me to do whatever I’m told by people lacking moral guidance? Noooo.

 

 

It’s safe to say my people and I wouldn’t, and didn’t, join the other tourists and historical groups peacefully gathering on the Capitol, and in the Capitol, while elected officials doing the people’s work certified the Electoral College vote count for the 2020 election abandoned the joint session of congress and went into lockdown before the mob arrived.

I believe the above statement to be historically accurate, although the official version posted on whitehouse.gov shares a different version.

 

The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as “insurrectionists” and framing the event as a violent coup attempt.

 

As a history man, I take all news with a grain of salt. Everything needs at least three supporting documents.

Take the end of the Romanov family in Russia in 1918:

 

Late on the night of July 16, Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children and four servants were ordered to dress quickly and go down to the cellar of the house in which they were being held.

There, the family and servants were arranged in two rows for a photograph they were told was being taken to quell rumors that they had escaped.

Suddenly, a dozen armed men burst into the room and gunned down the imperial family in a hail of gunfire.

Those who were still breathing when the smoked cleared were stabbed to death.

 

It took seventy years to clear up any confusion.

 

My People?

Like you, I’ve been in crowds.

Not mobs, but crowds.

My most recent crowd was a night game at U of O’s Autzen Stadium.

My biggest crowd was gathered in Philadelphia to hear President Ford’s Bicentennial speech in 1976.

One moment we were all in the streets and on the sidewalks, then the street clearing move.

The next moment we were all shoved up on the sidewalks, pressed so tight against the buildings that parents of young children held them overhead against the crush.

 

 

Crowds take on a life of their own.

They move, you move. They get arrested, you get arrested.

From one crowd to the next, the plan has never been to go anywhere and ‘Fight like hell or I won’t have a country.’

I’ve been in the U.S. Army where people do the fighting based on orders from their squad leader, their platoon leader, their company leader, and so on in the chain of command.

Would I follow orders barked from a microphone at a political gathering? Nooooo.

But like the dozen or so armed men who rushed in to shoot and stab a man, his wife, their five children, and four servants, there are people desperate to show they belong and willing do anything they’re told to prove it.

That’s not you, and that’s not me, but based on current events in Minnesota, it is somebody.

 

The Problem With Careful Planning

Make a plan, tell others their part in the plan, and see what happens.

Everyone interprets instruction differently.

“Go here and do that,” turns into, “Go where and do what?”

With no questions asked, they go somewhere and do something, then try and explain how things went impossibly wrong.

It’s like a conversation I had recently where I explained why I don’t make plans and expect anyone to follow them.

I’m married.

 

 

Get married and you fall into two categories: Follow your wife’s plans, or forget about it.

Forget about it?

Go ahead and make plans for you and the wife, then tell her all about it.

Will she add extras, like extra supplies, extra stops along the way, and decide the time to start until it all feels like her plan, not yours?

If not, it will after she invites her friends to join in.

A good wife does all of that.

A bad husband whines, while a good husband adapts plans.

I’ve heard of a newly married man complaining to his mom with, “She’s always telling me what to do, then tells me I’m wrong when I do it.”

 

 

The remedy? Listen carefully and be precise; step one, step two, step three.

Then, when the wife adds five more steps, just make sure your three are included. It’s not easy, and it may not feel like your plan, but it’s up to you to make sense of it.

Or forget about it and do whatever you feel like doing, and make up a good story when asked if you’re married, because you won’t be for long, and if you are it will be a marriage of misery, just not for you because you have the hand, the upper hand.

Or forget about it and find a new wife, then the wife after that and the wife after that.

 

PS: The married man, the good husband, mixes his plans with wife plans. If she doesn’t have any plans, then you will inspire her to make plans which may or may not mix well with your original plan.

Keep stirring, hubby.

 

PSS: The married man who boasts of his wife following his every demand is lying. If it’s his fourth wife and he married a wooden pole, then he is a woodpecker, not a man.

Plan accordingly.

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