I love cartoons. I use them for all sorts of examples and teaching lessons. The perennial Peanuts episode where Lucy holds the football so Charlie Brown can kick it is one of the best. Chuck has had years of experience with attempting to kick the ball while Lucy Van Pelt holds it and at the last minute she pulls the football away, he kicks thin air, and falls on his back. Every year he would ask her if she was going to hold it steady and not yank it away and she would assure him that he could depend on her. And every year she would pull it away. Life can be like this in so many areas. One of the best examples is politics. Whether you are on the LEFT and are mad that your chosen President has not closed Guantanamo Bay as he promised or pulled out of war instead of getting into a third one...or...you are from the RIGHT and you had hoped your newly elected Republican majority in the House was actually going to save us money and cut the budget... you are just Charlie, counting on Lucy, and after putting your trust into the deal, they pull the football away.
The above cartoon is one of the few Conservative ones in America. Our paper begrudgingly puts it among the 27 Liberal comic strips for "balance." This one addresses the Head Start Program which has been studied every which way and found to be statistically useless. Yet we continue it because it feels good. There are other similar programs and at the end of the day their cumulative effect is a huge budget deficit and a horrendous Debt. No matter which Lucy we choose, we always end up on our backs looking up at the sky saying "Egads, foiled again."
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