I found myself, in a quiet moment, wondering about how childhood games apply to adulthood.  I found some interesting parallels, especially when it comes to schoolyard games and modern politics.

Remember playing Simon Says?  One person is the leader, who calls out orders telling the other kids to move in a certain way ("Simon says take three steps back"), and everyone does it.  The orders follow each other rapidly.  Get it wrong, and you're out.  Move when Simon doesn't say, and you're also out.

This classic game teaches kids a few things, such as paying attention, thinking on one's feet, and being coordinated.  It also teaches obedience to commands.  For the caller, getting the rest of the kids to follow his instructions teaches leadership.  It can be fun, especially when it's just a group of kids doing it.  As with many things on the school playground, when the teacher is leading the moves, it's less engaging.

My parallel to adulthood is pretty obvious.  We have our game leaders — like Nancy Pelosi — calling out moves or, in the case of politics, implementing bills and new game rules.  If congresspeople and the mainstream news folks don't follow her lead and jump the right way, they're out of the game.

When Nancy says "COVID relief," even though that's only a small component of the bill Congress just passed, with the greater part consisting of bridge-to-nowhere projects and crony payoffs, everyone falls in line to be able to keep playing.  News media cooperate, hyping the payments to individuals and families and puffing up the minute help for small businesses.  Nobody mentions the other 90% of the money and where it's going, and nobody mentions where the money is going to come from — except for the evil right-wingers.

When Nancy proudly names her signature bill "H.R. 1" and tries to bury that its purpose is to strip Americans of all legal state voting rules so we can have a dictatorship in the ensuing chaos, the progressives in Congress and the media again move in lockstep, playing the game with single-minded concentration.

It doesn't matter to them that the bill lets any person, citizen or not, who claims to be over 16 (and how would you know?) vote as many times as he wants, wherever he wants, without any voter verification.  Nor does it matter that it legalizes harvesting votes.  It's irrelevant that it automatically registers anyone who does anything with any government entity (like register a car or get a welfare check).  No one cares that it allows vote-counting for ten days after the election.

Congress jumps, no matter how contorted the move is, and the media manage to follow the moves perfectly, ignoring anything but the leader's command.  God help us if the Senate doesn't kill this thing!

When Nancy says it was an insurrection on January 6, damn it, it was.  Arrest those peaceful protesters!  Arrest them wherever they are!  Arrive in armored vehicles and make a show of it!  When Nancy doesn't say a word about Antifa burning the Portland federal courthouse, with people inside, it didn't really happen.  Nor did the Breonna Taylor protests a few days ago.  Hear anything about those?  It was the anniversary of her death, you know.  Some people went nuts in some places.  Nobody jumped to report it, because people knew that if they had, they'd be out of the game.

This is no longer an obedience "game," for it's way too real.  Nancy and her ilk are playing for keeps, where the penalty for not jumping on command is far more severe than being sidelined for the remainder of the game session.  The penalty is that our grandkids may not get a chance to grow up in the country we did, where they have the right to make use of the skills they ought to be learning (and that have been denied them for the last year) to make a living, and to live life with the freedom to espouse their own convictions and express their own opinions.  They will have to learn to jump on command, too.

Image: Children's games by Virginia State Parks (cropped).  CC BY 2.0.