The Awful Responsibility Of Time

In the early 1990s I took a Time Management course that presented many impressive techniques for making your day more efficient – knocking many more items off your to-do list than you would have otherwise been able to accomplish.  Then the last half hour of the course the instructor inspirationally explained that the course was not really about knocking items off a list – it was about making sure the items on the list were important to you to ensure you were getting the most out of life – getting the most out of your most precious commodity: Time.  Now that is really the utmost in time management.

 

With the above as a backdrop I have wondered why so many Republican Congressmen have been announcing their retirements, resignations, or deciding to run for different offices – 35 House Republican incumbents leaving the House is more than twice the number of Democrats leaving.  After all current Republican Congressmen probably have the last Republican president of their lifetimes to work with – none of the other 16 Republican presidential candidates in 2016 could have beaten HRC, as rotten as she was, & Trump is a once in a lifetime high energy figure to lead America for the next seven years away from the political correctness that is destroying the country.

 

The biggest retirement surprise to me was Jason Chaffetz, Utah Congressman & Chairman of the powerful high-profile House Oversight & Government Reform Committee who won  re-election in November 2016 by a margin of 74% to 26%.  In April 2017 Chaffetz suddenly announced he would not run again in 2018 & then one month later announced he was retiring effective June 30, 2017 – less than six months into his 5th term.

 

I heard Chaffetz tell Brian Kilmeade on Brian's radio program that he had spent more than 1,500 nights away from his family in eight years – many of these nights in distasteful fund raising functions - & had missed too many family birthday parties & other celebrations.

 

Now all of this unpleasant hard work is certainly known when anyone decides to run for Congress which made me suspicious that something else was in play & that something else was the February 9, 2017 town hall meeting in Brighton High School in Chaffetz's congressional district in Utah that was more unpleasant than any fund raising function.  Click here to see Chaffetz peppered with questions from a disorderly, disrespectful, disruptive, out of control crowd inside the High School & here to see the uproarious protesters outside the building that far outnumbered those inside.

 

Chaffetz accused the crowd of being paid protesters.  Either the great majority of the 26% of the district that voted against Chaffetz all came out or the crowd was organized by social media & many were not even from the district.  I choose the latter.

 

In short, who would want to face this again?  Chaffetz never did. 

 

As bad as Chaffetz's town hall was it was child's play compared to NJ Congressman Tom MacArthur's Willingboro town hall on May 10 that ran for over five hours.  I saw more than two hours of the town hall including this belligerent menacing tirade by a man I thought several times was going to physically attack MacArthur.  In 2016 Trump had won 9% of Willingboro & MacArthur won 12% so this crowd seemed much more representative of the anger prevalent in the town than did Chaffetz's crowd in the High School.  MacArthur really walked into the lion's den but has not indicated he is resigning.

 

Now NJ Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen certainly did not need the Chaffetz-Mac Arthur examples to forsake in-person town hall meetings; he had replaced them with telephone town hall meetings for quite some time before 2017 when the rash of belligerent town hall meetings began – in this respect Frelinghuysen derogatorily was a man ahead of his time.  So instead the protesters come every week to Frelinghuysen's district office to draw attention to both his votes to repeal ObamaCare & against the December tax reform bill – in other words Frelinghuysen can't win in NJ despite being in his 24th year in Congress.  Without giving a reason, Frelinghuysen – eligible to continue serving as chairman of the powerful

Appropriations Committee until 2023 – announced he is retiring after this session of Congress.

 

But SC Congressman Trey Gowdy's announced retirement is sincere & truthful & exemplifies the Time Management lesson explained above.  Congressman Gowdy has been the subject of or played a prominent part in several posts on this blog during his seven years in Congress.  Click here & go to the 33:00 minute mark to hear Congressman Gowdy tell Martha MacCallum that two thirds of his life is in the rear view mirror & that he wants to make sure the time he has left is spent on things he can make a difference in – & government service is not one of those things.  This is very similar to the message SC Senator Jim DeMint sent when he resigned from the Senate on January 1, 2013 saying he could get more done for America as the President of the Heritage Foundation than he could in the Senate.

 

In the last post I challenged the readership to use the insight gained from reading RTE over the years to make a clear, definite, & tangible contribution to the future success of our country.  Because ultimately, none of us have the luxury to think we will not be held to account or be affected as America slips away.  We are all no different than Trey Gowdy - going "into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history & the awful responsibility of Time."¹ 

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1. Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men.