Call me a cockeyed optimist if you will (my wife says I'm naive), but I've always figured there were some basic things upon which we can all agree.
Until last year, that is.
Last year, 2025, was the year that the optimism was finally beaten out of the former little boy who figured there had to be a pony in that pile of manure. It took just shy of 75 years for it to happen, but happen it did.
“Dave, Dave, Dave,” my wife likes to say, as she starts yet another eye-rolling lecture on what a babe in the woods I can be. If opposites attract, it works for us, as she's just as ardent in the evidence-driven, scientific-method, cold, hard truth realist department as I am hopeless Pollyanna optimist.
It can make conversation over breakfast dicey.
FOR INSTANCE, I have always believed that Republicans and Democrats, in the final analysis, could agree on rooting out waste in government.
In my more primitive, positive-leaning noggin, I figured both sides would hate waste, because they want more money for the things that float their boats.
Goofy, moon-beam social programs and government-paid change-your-sex options, as we see it, for liberals. And Flash Gordon defense systems and starve-your-grandma budget frugality, as they see it, for we conservatives.
Made sense to me.
“Dave, Dave, Dave,” I can hear my wife saying. She and her cynic colleagues knew all along that, while worthy of support, last year's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) waste-cutting measures would be vehemently opposed by our Democrat friends.
And darned if that didn't happen.
The cynics were right. Even eliminating the craziest USAID-funded programs drew the vociferous opposition and ridicule of our Democrat friends.
Like spending millions to maintain empty buildings, paying benefits to dead people, and spending $1.5 million on a Sesame Street production in Serbia.
For months, DOGE came up with example after example of shameless waste.
The very notion of eliminating waste, however, earned Elon Musk (who came up with DOGE) the hatred of the Left, as they fell out of love with their electric cars, vandalized Tesla dealerships, and even threatened Musk's life.
There was no way our liberal friends were going to go along with anything Musk and the reviled Trump proposed.
Much of DOGE's work resulted in cutting waste, but not nearly as much as Musk predicted, and he ultimately had to leave the effort to curb public relations damage to his companies.
One of his volunteers, with the unfortunate nickname of “Big Balls,” was severely beaten on the streets of Washington D.C.
ANOTHER INSTANCE of things I thought we could agree upon – Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts to deport the “worst of the worst,” convicted murderers, child molesters, rapists, vicious gang members, who are here illegally.
“Surely we can agree on THAT,” I thought. “Dave, Dave, Dave” my wife lamented.
Somehow, she knew our Democrat friends would much rather have a Somalian fraudster or a Venezuelan gang member living next door, than to support even the most common sense effort that Donald Trump – who they consider the Beelzebub of our times – had anything to do with.
She knew that our liberal friends would don crazy costumes, scrawl obscene taunts on crude signs, and risk carpal tunnel syndrome displaying their middle fingers to oppose sending one murderer or rapist back home.
The craziness in frozen Minneapolis last week didn't surprise our more cynical friends, who have a disturbing track record of being right.
And my final FOR INSTANCE – one would think a secure border would be something upon which we can agree.
But no, the uniformed ICE troops keeping mobs from breaching our southern border are now spat upon, called Nazis, Gestapo, rammed with cars, and pelted with rocks, snowballs and fireworks in Minneapolis, Portland, and other lunatic locales.
They view ICE officers as Mongol hordes invading their Land of 10,000 Nut Cases.
It's taken a whole 75 years, but the good-natured optimism and sunny disposition has finally been beaten out of the former little boy...
Who figured for decades that there had to be a pony in that pile of manure.
I guess not.
(I hate it when my wife is right.)
Dave Simpson can be contacted at DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
