Dealing with mess

One of my best friends came to Atlanta today so that she could ride with me to see my parents in South Alabama over the Memorial Day weekend. My youngest son cleaned up the condo so that it would be clean when she got here.

He picked up everything and put it in my bedroom. The rest of the condo looks great, but I almost had a stroke when I saw my bedroom. Papers and files that I had sorted and was working with on the dining room table are lumped together and dumped in the floor. Dirty clothes are in a Rubbermaid tote next to the dresser. Boxes and bags of books that I had brought home from school, because I was afraid they would get misplaced over the summer, are in the middle of my bed.

As I lift things and sort through them, I expect to see a box of dirty dishes at any minute (I hope I’m wrong). It reminds me of when my daughter cleaned her bedroom before company. She put the lid down on the toilet in her bathroom and stuffed everything into the bathroom then locked and closed the door.

When my stepfather took his knife out and unlocked the door, piles of stuff fell out on him.

If you don’t do things right when you clean up a situation, you create a bigger mess or you just make a mess in another area. It is impossible to hide mess. You have to deal with it or it re-emerges in a different place.

There are several rules about dealing with a messy situation:

1. You can’t hide it. It eventually comes out.
2. The more you stir it up, the worse it becomes.
3. To eliminate it, you have to start with the root cause.
4. Sometimes you have to get rid of things.

Our government has become so dysfunctional that all we get from Washington is mess and messy situations. We have corruption, bribery, lobbyist and unethical behavior as the political norm. The media goes beyond reporting and they stir the situation to sensationalize the news (they don’t have to stir much, the news is pretty sensational without help). The root cause of the problem is embedded in a polarized Congress and a party system that chains members to party lines. Additionally, we have a system of political pressure groups and lobbyist who only look out for themselves. Sometimes as citizens, we need to use our power of the vote to clean house so that we can maintain a government of the people, by the people and for the people.