How I'm different from the Puli

It snowed last night. Only the second snow of the year in Connecticut, for God's sake, and it's already well into January.

One thing I've noticed (two things actually) is that Bela, our Puli dog, loves to eat snow and more often than not, it makes him throw up--cold on warm, who knows why...but the evidence is there.

The other thing I've noticed is that Bela will never, in his Puli brain, make the connection between "eat snow...throw up" and stop eating snow.

That makes me different from my Puli. Human beings make the connections between actions and results.

Except, oh my!, Republicans in the House have passed repeals of the Affordable Care Act about 80 times now and it hasn't been repealed.

And, oh my!, we as a nation keep getting involved in wars in the Middle East though none of them end well.

And, oh my!, we in the Western Hemisphere keep thinking, against all evidence to the contrary, that if we're only patient enough everyone will decide to just get along.

And, oh my!, we keep imagining that if we only give rich people tax cuts and other benefits, all that wealth will 'trickle down' to the rest of us.

A friend of mine says the difference between rats and human beings is that if you stop putting cheese down one of the avenues of a rat's maze, the rats will stop going there. But human beings will keep doing the same things over and again, expecting the cheese to be there and things to turn out differently if we only do it one more time.

So, in the end, I eat the snow and throw up and don't get the connection. We all do, I think.

Ponder that.