"Cleaning Up The Parking Lot"

 

This is a good analogy, and yes I shamelessly cribbed it off farcebook.  Yes I do fall into the first group, I will return the shopping cart plus any other on the way to the shopping cart corral.  The shopping cart corralling is a good analogy for the decay of society, way back in the day, people took civic pride in doing the little things that made the greater society function.  Now it is all about "me-me-me".  Iran is a symptom, nobody wanted to deal with the messy situation, and kept pushing it down the road, and hoped the problem would go away, well President Trump doesn't care, he knows this is his second term, and besides he is a fixer, not a kick the can down the road person, so the can is getting handled.

  Samelessly clipped from Michael Smith.

I’ve posted before about the “shopping cart test.” You know the one. It asks whether we are the kind of people who return the cart to the cart corral in the parking lot, or whether we simply set it free to roam the vast asphalt plains as nature intended.

We have one of those Walmart Express stores about three miles from our house. I had to run down there yesterday and either the cart wranglers had just donned their silver spurs, mounted their electric steeds, and rounded up the herd for delivery to the railhead in Abilene, or the shoppers were all passing the test, because there were no carts milling about unsupervised anywhere.

I also post a lot about history—not because I claim to know everything about it, but because historical patterns reveal something important about human behavior. Humans tend to believe their age is unique, that the problems of their time are unprecedented, and that human nature itself has evolved—but it really hasn’t. The basic impulses that drive human conduct—ambition, fear, pride, self-interest, responsibility—are remarkably constant across centuries. What changes are the tools. Each generation simply invents new and more dangerous toys while repeating the same old mistakes. I just posted about the connection between Botticelli’s final painting, completed more than five hundred years ago, and the strange moment we are living through in America today.

As I was driving home from what we call “Baby Walmart,” I was catching up on some podcasts and thinking about President Trump’s posture toward Iran. Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that the shopping cart test provides a useful analog for how nations approach persistent global problems. For those in Rio Linda, that means I’m about to use examples to explain a larger point—that’s what an analogy is.

Imagine the world as a parking lot. In that global parking lot there appear to be four general schools of thought when it comes to the carts.

The first group believes the carts should be returned to the cart corrals by the people who used them. It is the simplest model of responsibility: if you took it out, you put it back. Order exists because individuals accept small obligations that keep the broader system functioning.

The second group believes the carts are entirely the responsibility of the store employees. After all, someone is paid to deal with it, so why bother? Just unload the groceries, leave the cart wherever it stops rolling, and drive away. From this perspective, maintaining order is always someone else’s job.

The third group sits somewhere between the first two. They intellectually agree that the carts should be organized and returned, but they quietly assume someone else will probably handle it. They support the idea of responsibility in the abstract, just not necessarily the practice of it.

Then there is the fourth group. These are the people who don’t really think about the carts at all. They leave the trolley wherever it happens to land—sometimes squarely in the middle of a parking space—and go on about their day without giving the matter another thought.

When it comes to Iran, much of the world seems to fall into the latter three groups.

Many believe the United Nations should be dealing with the issue, because international institutions were supposedly created to manage such problems. Others assume it is not really their concern as long as they keep enough distance from the situation. And still others simply avoid thinking about it altogether.

In truth, nearly every American president since Jimmy Carter has treated Iran like the far corner of the parking lot where abandoned carts accumulate. Since 1979, leaders of both parties have tried variations of the same approaches. Some argued it was not truly America’s problem. Some handed off the issue to international bodies in the hope that diplomacy would gradually bring the carts back into order. Others simply tried to stay far enough away that the mess would not affect them directly. None of those approaches solved the problem, at best they managed it temporarily. They nudged a few carts out of the way and bought some time. Yet the underlying disorder remained, and over time the number of loose carts in that corner of the lot simply continued to grow.

Eventually a parking lot full of stray carts produces predictable consequences. Cars get dented by runaway trolleys. Parking spaces disappear beneath clusters of metal. Customers start walking halfway across the lot just to find a cart to use. Even if you personally return your cart every time, if enough people do not, the disorder eventually affects everyone. The probability that your brand-new 2026 GMC Sierra 1500 AT4X gets a nice little ding on the door steadily increases. That is how neglected problems work. They rarely stay politely confined to the corner where we left them.

At some point only one thing restores order: someone deciding the problem has gone on long enough. Someone walks out into the lot, looks around at the mess, gathers a team, and begins pushing carts. The broken ones go to the scrap pile. The usable ones go back to the store. Order is restored not through discussion alone, but through the decision to act.

That, for better or worse, is the role Trump appears to be assuming. After more than four decades of presidents from both parties leaving the carts scattered across the Iran section of the parking lot, he has essentially looked at the situation and said the mess is no longer sustainable.

He has told Pete Hegseth to get a crew together and start cleaning up the lot. The rusty fifty-year-old carts that cannot be fixed go into the scrap bin. The serviceable carts get pushed back where they belong.

Reasonable people can debate whether that approach will succeed. Foreign policy is rarely simple, and history has a habit of surprising those who think they have solved it.

One thing is clear: leaving the carts scattered across the parking lot forever was never a solution. Eventually a functioning system requires someone willing to walk into the mess, grab the handle, and start pushing things back into order—because if nobody does, the parking lot eventually belongs to chaos.