A remarkable, historic period of change (worth a read for some perspective)

<snip>
But step back and take an accounting of these last few years: The United States of America, a land where slaves were kept 150 years ago and bathrooms were segregated as recently as 50 years ago, elected and reelected our first black president. We passed and ratified a universal health-care system. We saw the first female Speaker of the House, the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice, and the first openly gay member of the Senate. We stopped a Great Depression, rewrote the nation’s financial regulations, and nearly defaulted on our debt for the first time in our history. Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, Maine, Maryland, Washington and the District of Columbia legalized gay marriage, and the president and the vice president both proclaimed their support. Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana. We killed the most dangerous terrorist in the world and managed two wars. We’ve seen inequality and debt skyrocket to some of the highest levels in American history. We passed a stimulus and investment bill that will transform everything from medical records to education and began a drone campaign that will likely be seen as an epochal shift in the way the United States conducts war.

Americans of good faith disagree over the worth of these initiatives and the nature of these milestones. None of us know the verdict that history will render. But we can say with certainty that the pace of change has been breathlessly fast. We have toppled so many barriers, passed so many reforms, completed so many long quests, begun so many experiments, that even those of us who’ve been paying attention have become inured to how much has happened.
<snip>
There is a theory in evolutionary biology called “punctuated equilibrium.” It holds that most species don’t change much for long periods of time, but then they change dramatically, in rapid bursts, over geologically short periods of time.

Political scientists Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones have argued that “punctuated equilibrium” describes the path of political systems, too. Typically, politics is held in stasis, with little progress being made in the slow boring of those hard boards. But when change does come, it’s not a steady process of incremental advances but a breathless flurry in which the boards give all at once.

Whether we intended to or not, whether it was sufficient or not, whether we liked it or not, we have been living through a remarkable period of political change in these last few years. We have bored through so many hard boards that we’re no longer surprised when we reach the other side, and we mainly wonder why we haven’t gotten through more of them, or why we didn’t choose different ones. But viewed against most other eras in American life, the pace of policy change in these last few years has been incredibly fast. Historians, looking back from more quiescent periods, will marvel at all that we have lived through. Activists, frustrated at their inability to shake their countrymen out of their tranquility, will wish they’d been born in a moment when things were actually getting done, a moment like this one.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/11/11/the-remarkable-pace-of-change-weve-seen/

I think when you are busy boring through hard boards, you are so concentrated on the act that you forget to look at what barriers have been passed. This last board knotted with Teaspitters and such has been particularly hard.
What a ride!