On off switches

Ages ago - just after the invention of usable electricity in the home (joke) - my parents gave me a train set. Lionel Trains were the only real game in town and mine came in a box almost exactly like the picture with a track layout that was roughly a circle and not a very big one at that.  It fit nicely on one part of our ping pong table - all level and eye height - with the caboose almost nudged by the front of the engine.

It simply went in circles. ... and very slow circles at that because the darn thing would fly off the tracks if you weren't careful about your speed and 5 year old hands had, well, a handful trying to put the thing back on a round track.  I hounded my poor father into buying some straightaway track so I could make an oval rather than a circle and at the time these pieces were 9 cents each so a month of being a good kid and spending zero and asking for zero later I had almost a dollar so I could get 10 pieces and I remember the store in Dayton so vividly even now and Mr. Murphy who sold me the 10 pieces and I filled my ping pong table with a big deal set.

The engineer (moi) now had straightaways to go with sharp curves and to make that work out, the set contained a "rheostat" which was and is a forerunner of the old dimmer switch that makes for romantic lighting at the dinner table.  Rheostats are potentiometers of sorts as I learned later but all I knew at that time was that the more you moved the lever the fast the train would go - much like a dim light glows bright.

What I figured out that it was something of a gas pedal on a car...an electric car of sorts... and from then on it was figuring how much you could "open it up" on the straightaway and when you had to scale back so the train wouldn't fly off on the floor when it hit curve number one.  My brother and I actually timed laps to get the most we could in 1 minute (we could get around 8 times if all things went right).  I learned a lot from my train set; the most important being to take advantage of straightaways and an ounce of precaution at the turns really helped.  In short I learned that trains ran on a rheostat and if we just used an on-off type switch.....well there was no setting that either produced enough speed down the straight part to make it worth while and it was the curves that were the issue.

Congress is in a bit of a curve right now with a whole bunch of people who never played with trains not understanding that if they don't dial down they won't make the curve.  It is a serious moment and I don't want to make light of it.  We just got the train cars back on the track so the darn thing will run and some hot heads want to flip the switch to 10.

I'm not keen on people who don't own rheostats; who have never progressed past the on/off switch.  You know them as the all or nothing types with no concept of shades of grey.  You can shout at them "don't do that" all you want but they will still hit the switch.  Congress is about to "hit the switch" because about 80 or so of them aren't cognizant of the curves that are ahead.

Stop the train, I want to get off.