Acting more like children than, er, um ...

Remember those furious arguments with classroom friends turned fiends when you knew you were right and they horribly wrong. 
As young passions rose, you could have ripped off their arms, torn out their throats, flattened their bicycle tyres.

Then the fury eased enough to recognise that in fact the adversary might be rather bigger than you, older, trained in jousting, and worse, actually taller now. 

How to avoid likely slaughter?

Fight's forgotten

Out of the bag of tricks we seem to be born with, the notion arrives: change the subject.

You do, and the fight is forgotten as discussion develops the new line of talk. Naturally, by the time maturity comes round, we're far too intelligent to fall back on that old conservational safety trick.

So this could never be the ploy of those brilliant citizens whose faultless behaviour, natural honesty, and sheer decency, has allowed them to win votes in elections.

It's interesting to see how a government snowed under by the suicidal action beginning with the letter B and rhyming with sex-it as in sex-it-up, as in exaggerate, suddenly found ways to change the subject.

Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com