It’s hard to remember when the continual coverage and commentary wasn’t going on―has it only been a year’s worth? When we first began to be bombarded by candidates to the right of us, candidates to the left―volley and thunder? It’s been going on for so long, the sound and the fury, the sorrow and the pity, the hootin’ and hollerin’, sack and pillage, the rack and ruin that the heartiest of handicappers and odds-on-layers, even the inexhaustible Steve Kornaki is flagging.
It appears the mighty ship of state itself, while still under full steam, is rumored to be plowing toward some awful unknowable destiny that even the best prognosticators can’t divine. It looms out there in the cold and dark, laying in wait, this premonition of annihilation. Something certain and indiscernible this way comes, submerged, but on and on and on we rush toward it―and where on earth, dear Lord, is the steady hand to hold fast the wheelhouse tiller?
Once upon a time, I fell in love with a brave young sea scout who grew into an intrepid American captain of invention. He too was in the throes of thinking our country and the world was set on a path to heedless ruination, and who’s to say they’re not? This is what the captain said when I was mired in my own despair.
“But what can one person do?” I asked him. Everybody suspicious each of the other, the ugliness and waste we’d visited on our beautiful blue-green planet.
“Something hit me very hard once,” he said. “Thinking about what one little man could do. Think of Queen Elizabeth, the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. There’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.”
“But I’m nobody,” I argued. “I don’t have any special skills for the big changes that have to be made.”
“What you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way. Of course, they happen only when you’re dealing with really great integrity.”
I think you know the sea scout I refer to. “Call me Trim Tab.” That’s what he had carved onto his tombstone. Stand by to be amazed at the beautiful things he made and the great and earthshaking ideas with which he graced us before he set sail for the final crossing of the bar. He’s the kind of American we can be when we quit with the name-calling and nay-saying.
Here’s what he said when I was lucky enough to meet him, “Call me Bucky,” Mr. Fuller said. “Or call me Trim Tab.”