Congressional Monkey Business

My friend, Bruce, sent me this message earlier today:

Psych 101

If you start with a cage containing five monkeys and inside the cage, hang a banana on a string from the top and then you place a set of stairs under the banana, before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.

As soon as he touches the stairs, you spray all the other monkeys with cold water. After a while another monkey makes an attempt with same result... All the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put the cold water away.

Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To his shock, all of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys, replacing it with a new one.  The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked.  The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment... With enthusiasm.

Then, replace a third original monkey with a new one, followed by a fourth, then the fifth.  Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs.  Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

Finally, having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, none of the monkeys will  try to climb the stairway for the banana.
Why, you ask?  Because in their minds... That is the way it has always been!
This is how Congress operates... And is why, from time to time, all of the monkeys need to be REPLACED.

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson~  

The story is interesting, of course, but I believe it misses an obvious and much larger point about the congressional monkey business that has become de rigueur of late. So I sent the following reply:

Bruce, 

I believe your Psych 101 monkey experiment story perfectly accounts for the conservative mindset, which has been carefully engineered by forty years of right-wing talk radio hosts beating their audiences into fearing and hating the dreaded “other." 

You can’t turn this one around and apply it to liberals. It’s the conservatives who are ideologically locked into a “That is the way it has always been!” view of the world and who are hell-bent on keeping it that way - that is, their goal is to CONSERVE the status quo. 

Calling for the total replacement of the members of congress as if they were all monkeys is a false and foolish option. Not all members of of them are monkeys, and to say “they’re all the same" does a disservice to the ones who have actually been fighting for you. 

The real solution is to identify and remove those who have acted like self-centered monkeys and to support those have worked to serve our culturally diverse nation in today's changing world.

Finally, you can thank Ralph Waldo Emerson for this message. Consider it to be a kindness written as soon as possible rather than too late. My hope is that it might help you avoid devolving into a monkey. 

George 

PS: Thanks for inspiring my blog post for the day.