This reminds me of a San Rayburn quote. “It takes carpenters (and difficult if imperfect hard and coordinated lengthy labor) to build a barn — any jackass can kick boards off.”

I’m a “boomer”, “Xers” are my kids. I, we (boomers), failed in some key areas. For brevity I’m going to jump to generalizations and stereotyping.

Xers believe, think, strategize and act as if their personal world is “the” world. There is an old game previous generations of management would use to focus employees, committee members, etc. Draw a circle around yourself and confess “this is how much I control”. It’s sort of like saying “do your part”. Oh, Xers will complain and pontificate about the bigger perceived ecosystem that any circle (theirs) is in but fairly quickly tire and say “that is never going to change, I can’t change that, it’s bigger than me. I’ll focus on “my” world.

Sometimes Xers can be stirred (using social media) to organize large scale groupings like the Arab Spring. Suggest they follow it up with gritty, persistent, sweaty, muddy grinding and plodding to build imperfect but systemic and pragmatic infrastructure change and they fold like a cardboard tent in a rainstorm. It was quick and easy to build the cardboard house but no follow up to even brush on lacquer waterproofing let alone the drudgery of assembly of nails, boards, tarpaper and shingles.

Pete “Boot-a-judge” is a Rhodes Scholar and I could listen to him for hours. He knows what it takes, conceptually, to build a barn that will stand wind, rain and weather. Beto, more than any candidate in my opinion, can nail two boards together and knows we need a barn raising.

Then he (Beto) forgets. He talks about LGBT, controlling guns, rational immigration, environmental sustainability and new economy, healthcare as a human right. All of those things are challenging — but, but, but — they are just the farm creatures that go in the even more difficult and drudgery of a decent barn.

The “barn” is infrastructure work for “old” economy during transition, the need to make “compromise” and respect for alternate viewpoints deeply respected as American ethos of “out of many … one”, the horrifically glaring need for pragmatic proposals to stitch together working government by openly discussing means of diffusing and re-engaging the polar opposites, the long term weary job of organizing process and “herds of cats” to actually do plodding “tortoise” slow but massive progress.

Building (or re-building) a barn is much more difficult than painting a cute rainbow (artsy as it looks) onto weathered boards left by the humble builder of the original barn. This reminds me of a JFK speech made at Rice University in Houston:

… So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward …

…. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.