Change on the Cheap.  Many of us make humble attempts at giving back something to our communities by serving on committees for support organizations.  It is one of the great things about America that people try to reach out and help those that need it, without being paid to do it or directed to do it by our glorious and all-knowing government.  One of the maddening experiences in serving these organizations is when you have members on the committee that seem to want to make the cause at hand the center of their universe.  They are impassioned agents of change and want to talk the subject to death at every opportunity.  It is as if they want to fill up their empty lives with this cause and never turn it loose.  They want to plan eternally and put off doing something until the next meeting.  I place these kinds of people in a category I call “change on the cheap”.

These folks are pleasantly surprised that through a convergence of circumstance, they are suddenly empowered to speak for many and have the opportunity to influence something larger than themselves.  However, they fail to connect the dots between planning and doing.  They will sit at the table and talk until the group is exhausted.  They are deeply infected with mission creep and constantly come up with new ideas about how to do everything so much better.  Their enthusiasm is never-ending and becomes as annoying as the bubbly blonde host on the morning television or radio show.  And then (now here’s the rub), when the time comes to roll up the sleeves and actually accomplish something, they are nowhere to be found.  Either they are still consumed by the master plan or they have moved on to the next project.  They start a fire, feed it until it is flaming wide open, and then move on.   They don’t want to chop the wood, tend the fire, or clean up the ashes.  Their infinite wisdom moves them on to start the next fire before the preceding fire is even burning well.  They are talkers, not doers.  They are all hat and no cowboy.  They are as shallow as a water puddle.  They waste the time of the majority of other folks who are ready and willing to do the heavy lifting necessary to effect positive changes.  They drain the energy and resolve from organizations that are fueled by donations of time and money given by the goodness of the heart.  They are people seeking “change on the cheap”.  They never miss the photo op, but they are never around to clean up the tables, put away the chairs, and take out the trash.

Our president is such a person.  Even with his “signature” piece of legislation (Obamacare), he talked it to death, pleaded passionately for its passage, but never submitted an actual bill to Congress.  Instead he farmed its framing out to Reid and Pelosi and their fellow minions.  With a method that makes sausage making look like brain surgery, is it any wonder it has turned out to be the bureaucratic nightmare that it is?  He has spent his entire term as president either starting fires or campaigning (one and the same?), but he is never around at the front end to write the law, nor is he around at the backend to worry about the implementation.  Once he senses the sleeves being rolled up, he takes his cue to move on to the next fire; such a pity that one so capable is so very lazy.