The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Everyone should be familiar with the apocryphal phrase, often turned into a cliché by winners on television reality shows or sporting events and sometimes attributed to being popularized by American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson: On life, he allegedly said, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”

After years of chasing the dream through the journey I woke up this morning with another epiphany.

Something like Sir Isaac Newton who immersed himself in the waters of science, watched the apples fall from the tree, and came up with the mathematical theory of universal gravitation, I have a new formulation.

“It’s not just about the journey. It’s what we can learn from it.”

You can quote me on that.

The destination is the destiny. The journey is the path to enlightenment. Without the enlightenment, we may as well just get drunk and watch football games, vote to reelect Donald Trump as president, and find a lounge chair to sit back and watch the world come to a fiery end.

If it’s all about the entertainment, we are doomed.

Herein lies the value of living a simple, camping life in the woods — with an internet connection of course. It’s not just about escaping the stress of modern life. It’s about giving yourself time to think about our most pressing problems and how to solve them.

So I woke up pretty early this morning, turned on the iPhone hot spot as I made the coffee, and clicked on the New York Times website. There I saw a column by Thomas Friedman, a pretty smart guy for a rich man living the good life in New York. I mean he could just be spending his time sipping fine wine in his upper East Side townhouse looking down on the Big Apple and cranking out his 1,600 words a week to entertain liberals. But at least he is trying to grapple with our problems in his own way.

The Biggest Threat to America Is Us: If we fail, China, Russia and Iran won’t be to blame.

But somehow he failed to see that his idea for a column this week, for which I assume he brings in something like $20 million a year, could have been illustrated with more power in a simple cartoon.

I know he has been around as long as I have in this business, and must remember Walt Kelly, who gave us Pogo the possum.

Kelly’s famous cartoon with the words, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” is not enough on its own to save us. It helps to know the back story.

The phrase derives from a bit of military braggadocio that was reported during the War of 1812, when allegedly Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry said to William Henry Harrison after the Battle of Lake Erie: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

According to a number of historical comparisons, that phrase stands out along with John Paul Jones’s “I have not yet begun to fight,” and Julius Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered) as one of the most famous battle reports in history.

Even the famous quote, “We have met the enemy and he is us” did not originate with Kelly’s cartoon strip, however. In fact, it was first used on a poster to promote the first Earth Day in 1970.

Pogo the possum was the central character of a long-running daily American comic strip set in the Okefenokee Swamp in the Southeast, which engaged in social and political satire through the adventures of its anthropomorphic and funny animal characters. The cartoon featuring the famous quote showed Pogo picking up trash in the swamp and lamenting the ignorance of his compadres who were polluting their own nest.

Two Encounters

That would seem to be lesson enough for one day, but forgive me, for I am not through for the morning. There are two very recent incidents to report that illustrate where we are.

The mainstream media has struggled to figure out the Trump voter for the past two years with little or no success. I have tried to tell them they should probably talk to me about this since I know a thing or two about it being from Alabama, growing up with these rednecks, and spending a quite a bit of time in Mobile. That’s the city on the Gulf Coast where Jeff Sessions convinced Trump to hold his first stadium rally like a football game, which did about as much to get Trump elected as all the Russian meddling and Cambridge Analytica’s dark money ads on Facebook.

But of course they think they are better than me, smarter than me, richer than me, and they know best, all while newspapers are still going out of business and more journalist are out of a job.

That’s fine. We have the web press.

So just yesterday, I had two enlightening encounters with two big fans of Trump, which would never have happened if I had not journeyed here and kept my eyes and ears open. Under the circumstances, I must keep their identities a mystery. If they were paying me the big bucks, I could flesh the stories out more.

Since my readers are probably some of the smartest people on the planet, I’m sure they will get the point.

The first incident involved a conversation with a man who cuts grass for a living from Puerto Rico. I asked how his family was doing there after the big storm. You remember Hurricane Maria and how the U.S. government failed the people there and how Trump simply threw paper towels at them and told them to fend for themselves.

He said they were doing fine, much better now, thank you for asking.

Well then I casually mentioned what’s happening on the Fourth of July on the National Mall, and unprompted by me, the nice man said, I kid you not: “Trump is the greatest president ever. The way he’s getting rid of the illegal immigrants. He is getting so much done.”

I said nothing. Under different circumstances, I might have probed more. You see the dilemma, right?

The second incident involved an encounter with a retired former employee of the Eastman Kodak Company, a mechanic who worked on the machines that made the film. It’s another company, sort of like newspapers, that ignored the coming of new technology and arrogantly stuck to what it did best without innovating, thinking people would need photographic film and paper forever.

Now here’s a guy who has direct experience with the impact of changes due to new technology who should know better.

But he traveled all the way to Washington, D.C. from Rochester, New York just to hear President Trump speak on the Lincoln Memorial steps on Thursday. I avoided having a political conversation with the camper, but perhaps before he leaves on July 5, I might ask him to explain what he sees in Trump.

He asked me what I don’t like about Trump, but I changed the subject. I mean, what’s to like? Right?

It is a bit of a mystery. Maybe if we keep trying we will get to the bottom of this yet.

It’s up in the air whether it will be in time.

So you see it’s not just about the destination, or the journey. It’s what we learn from it.