Among the many traditions and rituals observed around the world – one holds a special place with the Gracious Mistress of a Parsonage and Yours Truly. Since I am accused of breaking everything in our house, I guess it will not hurt if I break the silence on this one.

he one great ritual we practice religiously at our house is dinner. Other things and activities in our society have replaced dinner today and few families actually eat dinner at home on anything like a regular basis.

Nothing is more sacred to my wife and me than observing the daily ritual of dinner. I know some people are very careless about their dinner. Rarely do they give much thought to the religious implications of the evening meal, which may be one reason our country is in such a moral decline. Little chance this will happen at our house.

A parish priest was being honored at a dinner on the 25th anniversary of his arrival in that parish. A leading local politician, who was a member of the congregation, was chosen to make the presentation and give a little speech at the dinner, but he was delayed in traffic.  Sooo.....the priest decided to say his own few words while they waited.

Lately, I have been listening to political campaign speeches, which has helped me catch up on some sleep I have missed in the last two years. Don’t get me wrong on this issue. It is not that I am bored with this whole business. It is simply the fact that if you have heard one political campaign speech, you have heard one too many.

I once read about a politician making an impressive campaign speech sometime after the Civil War.

“Fellow Citizens,” he bellowed passionately from his campaign stump, ”I have fought against the Indians. I have often had no bed but the battlefield, and no canopy but the sky. I have marched over the frozen ground till blood has marked every step.”

Growing up we did not have a TV in our home. My father was just too cheap to spend the money for something as frivolous as TV, so he bought comic books to read. “Books,” he often said to us, “are better than watching some silly TV program.” They were also cheaper.

Then one day something happened that changed everything. On November 22, 1963, the president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated. The next day my father went out and bought our first TV set.

Then everything changed in our home.

Our father stayed on top of all the stories connected with the president’s assassination. It was a sad time for our country.

My siblings and I were introduced to a phenomenon called cartoons. Now, I had a large collection of comic books which, if I had today and I could sell them and become a very rich man. However, a TV cartoon was something altogether different. It took us a long time to realize those cartoon characters were just that and not real people. To us, they were as real as real got.

Sometimes an idea will take possession of my mind and literally run with it. Most of the time when an idea sees the condition of my mind it slowly walks away shaking its head. Someone said a mind is a terrible thing to waste, but I’m sure they had no knowledge of my mind.

Then there is that odd moment when an idea completely disregards the condition of my mind and takes over. Such has been the case lately.

The idea that has taken up residence in my mind lately has to do with the condition of the leadership in our country. I have reached that glad time of life when I have the perspective of looking back over several decades.

We find ourselves once again in another political cycle. I call it a political cycle because everything is going around in circles. Each cycle seems to get bigger and bigger.

For instance. One day a politician will say one thing and the next day he will swing completely around and say something else. I would call it a merry-go-round, but there isn’t anything very merry about it. Rather, it is quite dizzy for me. What they really should call it is the “Dizzy-Go-Round.”

The politicians are counting upon people getting “dizzy” so they do not really know what is going on and who they are voting for. It is almost like a Ponzi scheme; more goes in than comes out.

Am I voting for the Thursday edition politician or the Friday edition? They carry the same name but you would not know they were the same person or even related.