Winston Churchill used to say that we, Americans, try every other option before we finally do the right thing. After everything else is exhausted we eventually do the right thing and I think that's true for Congress as well. And it's important for Americans to remember that politics has always been messy.
Families, particularly, tend to be the ones that you take the most for granted. They seem to slip under the radar, all those important things - it almost becomes second nature to do so.
We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.