The United States is historically based on both laws and shared accepted customs. Not every aspect of its operation and governance is laid out in the Constitution.

For example, George Washington set the custom that a President should only serve two terms. That precedent lasted roughly a hundred and fifty years, until Franklin Roosevelt ran for and won third and fourth terms, which led to the adoption of the Twenty-Second Amendment.

Then there was the understanding that the sitting President could nominate Supreme Court Justices, until Senate majority leader McConnell decided that the Senate didn’t have to accept and vote on nominees until after the next election.

Bit by bit, parts of the U.S. political structure that were taken for granted from past experience are being challenged or rejected simply because various politicians have, in effect, said, “There’s no law forbidding this; so I’ll do it.”

More often than not, when politicians and businesspeople do something unfair or biased or grossly advantageous to a significant group of people, public pressure increases for a law to forbid that practice.

The United States already has too many laws and regulations. At least, the Republicans think so, as do at least some Democrats, but in a democracy abuse of position and power creates more pressure for laws to restrict that abuse.

Bias and civil rights abuse continued despite the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and reaction to that abuse finally led to the Civil Rights Act and federal supervision of the acts of certain states.

Failure of corporations and businesses to clean up after themselves led to Superfund and hazardous waste laws, and cost the EPA Administrator her job, and sent the Assistant Administrator for Solid and Hazardous Waste to prison.

Abuse of market power by large corporations in consumer goods led to increasing federal intervention, and the creation of the Consumer Protection Agency.

As for Trump’s abuse of power based on doing things no other President has tried (except Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon), and that of the Republican majority in the Texas legislature in trying to turn state representatives into instant convicts, there are two possible outcomes – more legislation or dictatorship (also supported by more legislation).

Either way, we’ll have less freedom because too many people are willing to do anything that’s not expressly forbidden by law, either for power or profit, or out of fear of those in power.

And from what I see, few see the danger, and even fewer speak out.

For the past three months, men have been working to replace a sewer line running down the middle of the street beside university buildings here in town. We’re talking five blocks, a third of which is bordered by parking lots on one side or the other. The street is cordoned off a block at a time, but most of the time, no one is actually working. Days can go by with no apparent progress.

Because it’s a sewer line, and Cedar City doesn’t have a separate sewage and water entity, this “construction” has to be under municipal control or authority.

Now, at the same time, just off the northwest corner of the campus, the state of Utah is building a roundabout to replace a four-way stop sign on the main road into the university area, as well as one of the few direct routes to the downtown area from the west. Two months have passed since that section of road was closed (containing one of the three major overpasses of the freeway), and only a limited amount of ground has been torn up, and the university has been told that the closure will continue for at least another two months.

When fifteen thousand students return in less than a month, I suspect that there will be more than a little anger and confusion.

These aren’t federal projects; they’re state and local. So the blame here doesn’t lie with the feds.

Over roughly the same time period, we’ve seen entire subdivisions be laid out and the first houses going up on the west and south sides of town.

And, oh yes, in less than three weeks, an older hotel on the edge of the historic downtown was razed, the land cleared, and construction is underway on a half-block square Maverik super gas station. Why, I have no idea, given that there are three other Maverik gas stations within less than a mile, but I’m betting it will be operating before the roundabout or the sewer construction is complete.

To me, at least, all these are another indication of American public priorities.

“Compromise” is not a nasty word. In fact, compromise is the basis of a free society, yet far too many people fail to understand this.

A truly “free” society is one where one’s freedom to act is maximized within the law. In a free society, laws provide the guardrails so that someone else’s freedom doesn’t minimize or destroy yours.

The greatest problem facing any society is drawing the line between individual rights and maintaining the order necessary for society to function. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out, “without order, there is no liberty.”

Theodore Roosevelt had a similar view when he said, “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”

Because people have different views about how the order necessary for a working society should be structured and maintained and the degree of personal freedom optimal for that society, effective government requires compromise.

Yet today, both the far left and the far right seem to have forgotten this, each side wishing to impose through force of law its vision for society, even though some of those beliefs impose constraints on others that are not necessary to maintain order and public safety and legal imposition of some beliefs can result in physical harm to others.

A good example of such extremism are laws that prohibit abortion in all circumstances as well as any procedure that might conceivably result in abortion or miscarriage. As a result, both women and their unborn children are dying at record numbers in states like Texas.

Another is requiring Christian theology be taught and actively practiced in schools and other public, when roughly one-third of all Americans are not Christians. What’s ironic about this is that many of those insisting that Christian theology be more publicly imposed are violently opposed to the Islamic practice of Sharia, which would impose Muslim beliefs as law.

On the left, the attempt to require institutions mandate which pronouns are used by whom is nothing more than speech police. While I understand and respect people’s desires to maintain and announce their own gender preference, that should be a personal preference, not a government requirement. Requiring everyone to announce their gender identity by specific pronouns goes too far and attacks the right to personal privacy.

Unfortunately, the apparent simplicity of absolutism in government and religion can be so seductive that common sense – and compromise – are all too often swept away.

A while ago, I read an article that made a simple point about dogs – that they live in the present with all their attention focused on the moment. While this may be an overstatement, as someone who has lived with dogs for virtually my entire adult life, there’s a great deal of truth in that observation, although a dachshund hurrying to greet me with his squeaky pig in his mouth and his tail wagging is more likely thinking about the moment to come, rather than the present moment.

Even so, he’s obviously totally fixated on that moment to come, and once we’re playing with the squeaky pig, that’s definitely all that he’s concentrating on. But it’s a joyful concentration, with his tail wagging as he returns with the squeaky pig in his mouth. It’s not all rote concentration, either. Sometimes, he wants to play tug-of-war with me trying to pull the pig from his mouth (which won’t happen unless he lets me), and sometimes he throws his pig in the air as if daring me to catch it (that doesn’t happen, either, although he often manages to catch it unless he’s thrown it over and behind the computer and then begs me to recover it ). And if all that fails, he’ll drop the pig at my feet, with a whine that asks if I’m going to pick it up and throw it. I never know which he’ll do when he returns the pig.

One of our sons was dog-sitting several weeks ago. He was determined to see how long Buddy Mozart (don’t ask) would continue retrieving the pig. Our son gave up after two hours. Dachshunds are persistent and stubborn, even at play.

I obviously get great satisfaction out of writing, or I wouldn’t have worked so hard to get published and kept at it for so long, but I have to admit that I don’t often get the same unbridled joy from writing that Buddy Mozart does from chasing his squeaky pig or taking our morning walk.

That’s another reason why I love dachshunds.

In terms of presence in the F&SF field, in my view, authors roughly fall into five categories: wild and continuing bestsellers, such as Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Sarah Maas, and, recently, Rebecca Yarros; solid bestsellers; those lauded by various media, often regardless of sales; and everyone else.

Like a number of moderately successful authors, it took me years to become a successful full-time writer, i.e., one with a writing income sufficient to support a family.

My first science fiction story was published in 1973, a few months shy of my thirtieth birthday. My first novel appeared in 1982, a month after my thirty-ninth birthday. Given those dates, I was never considered an up-and-coming young F&SF author. In fact, I was rarely mentioned in F&SF trade publications. My first New York Times bestseller, as I recall, was Princeps, the second book of the Imager Portfolio, and that didn’t occur until I was in my sixties, although I did have another Times bestseller and have had quite a few Recluce books on the USA Today bestseller list in my fifties and thereafter.

Part of my comparative lack of “presence” in the F&SF field in my early writing years was likely because I didn’t even attend any conventions until I was forty-five. In fact, I really didn’t even know what a convention was or what it entailed, and working as a political appointee in Washington, D.C., took an enormous amount of time.

Another part was, I suspect, that my work has never fit into any of the F&SF marketing genres. I’ve never been nominated for, let alone won, a national award in the F&SF field, but I have won a few regional awards as well as awards in the romance field, including a Romantic Times Pioneer award, despite never having written an explicit sex scene (except for one).

Another factor is that my books appeal to a wide variety of readers, rather than a specific market segment. Because of these factors, the tours I did for Tor from roughly 1996 (after I left Washington, D.C.) to 2015 consisted of an evening signing every day and visiting as many bookstores as I could before and sometimes after the signing. Unfortunately, given the demise of so many bookstores and the smaller inventories of most of the survivors (and the greater restrictions on what managers of chain bookstores can order), this kind of handselling/personal presence marketing is no longer as effective as it once was in gaining and/or maintaining an authorial presence.

Another factor hampering author recognition is the effective demise of the mass market paperback, combined with the fact that most of the remaining bookstores carry much smaller numbers of backlist titles. Since eBooks are the replacement for mass market paperbacks, these days authors need to maintain some form of internet presence, but the problem there is that maintaining a presence on Facebook, X(aka Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok can be a full-time chore in itself, leaving less time for actually writing (which is why I only maintain a website).

And then, there’s the “fan” factor. For various reasons, the way and what certain authors write results in a sort of charisma that creates a wide and self-sustaining fan base, not necessarily based on the technical expertise of the writer, but usually where vivid storytelling subsumes everything else.

Given all the changes in publishing and communications, I’m glad I started writing when I did, because I suspect that, were I starting today, it would be difficult if not impossible to get published traditionally (given that it wasn’t easy back then) and almost that hard to establish a presence in the field as an independent self-published writer.

But then, who knows? “What ifs” are speculative at best.