Jacking our government joint

Recently I texted my friend and acupuncturist Adam. I told him I was having pain in my shoulder. "Where?" he asked. I sent him a picture pointing at the exact spot. He informed me that I "jacked my AC joint." "How did you do it?" he wanted to know. I told him I had been doing yoga, and he knew exactly what I had done. He said I did too much planking, which was true.

I needed him to explain how I injured myself because I didn't really know what my AC joint does. I've memorized its location, and identified it on an exam. I know what AC stands for. But I didn't realize what it did until I injured it. Then I would be in a yoga class, perfectly comfortable in bridge pose. But if I dared push it a bit further, take it up into a wheel pose, I found out the AC joint was involved. The pain tells me that my AC is involved. The pain is making it easy to understand all that my AC joint did for me.

That kind of pain is coming to all of us, in coming weeks and months, since our fellow citizens elected someone who is jacking our government joint. Things will be going along like they always have, and then something which always worked will just not work. Perhaps our tax refunds will be slow to be returned to us. Perhaps we will get food poisoning that would normally have been avoided. These pain points will help us come to better understand all the ways that government has served us for so long.

The next time you come to one of these pain points, I'd like to invite you into a kind of gratitude, gratitude for what worked for so long. Our postal workers have long been delivering the mail even on Sundays. Customs and Border Patrol have long been pleasant to citizens and foreigners at the border. The next time I am interrogated, I'm going to think of all of the times I breezed through, with Global Entry and a few questions. I'm going to think of all the ways that government worked for me, rather than dwelling on how it no longer does. I'm going to feel grateful for all of those people who chose careers in public service rather than the private sector.

I invite you to do the same.