The American people have been through a decade long interruption to their normal routine/comfort zone, commencing with the 2000 vote for President and ending with the summer recess of the House and Senate 2009. Along the way we managed to be attacked by murderous religious zealots, live through home grown terror in the form of white powder delivered via mail, a war that was labeled the ‘mother of all wars’ by Saddam and ‘Shock and Awe’ by the US which proved to be neither; well maybe it is becoming the ‘mother of all wars’ from a couple of different perspectives.
We managed to get through another presidential campaign, though Chad’s name did not come up again as being indecisive; a housing spike that turned out to be deeper than it was high -- ending in a nose dive for the economy never seen by the generation living today, driven there by the highest fuel costs experienced in a short period of time arriving at the end of the road where a lot of people are without jobs, homes, and food. A government, which has once again changed hands, and is printing monopoly money buying up pieces of our national monopoly board! It isn’t the Reading RR but GM; not hotels on Broadway but banks in Manhattan; the electric company is mandated by Cap & Trade promising to drive up costs for power so high people cannot afford the luxury. The Community Chest is TARP and if by CHANCE you have a get out of jail card it will be funded by Stimulus dollars. [The chain gang will have shovels.] Pretty soon, the government owns pretty much all the homes and businesses and you realize, the last vote you cast for change was really nothing more than another ‘roll of the dice’!
The interesting phenomenon that has chased itself from one end of the left/right spectrum to the other has been about the same thing but with different players. For the last few years of the Bush administration folks were up in arms over the Patriot Act, the Surveillance Act, the attempt to alter Presidential powers and changing of the verbiage to the ‘posse comitatus’ proviso. People were so utterly concerned about their right to privacy, their civil liberties, and rightly so, by the time the man who talked ‘change’ with a ‘yes we can’ do attitude figuratively walked off the water right onto the Presidential red carpet and began his reign. Yep, the folks who could not say enough about what was becoming of our constitutional rights, our individual liberties and our right to privacy moved their support from the dominant reigning party to the party that could do no right just a few years earlier. They voted and their mandate was clearly in support of change!
How’s that working out?
The nearly invisible presidency of Bush has become the weekly Obama Show at prime time. While the economy began to tank on the Bush watch the tank’s bottom has given way to a black hole sucking the life out of our once vibrant capitalist entrepreneurial country on the Obama watch. Bush’s intelligence gains have become Obama’s means.
Monopoly is now the name of the government game. Big CENTRAL Government where they sit you down and let you know what you are allowed to eat, drink, do, drive, where you get your healthcare, how warm/cold you can keep your home, because those smart appliances the Cap n Trade bill mandates will be radio frequency controlled and the utility companies will moderate the internal temps of our homes and businesses. They permit you to labor but you only get to keep a tithe of your pay, the government, now your mortgager, your banker, your health care provider, your ‘sin’ moderator [cigarettes, soda, chocolate, alcohol] your car dealer, your educator and volunteer coordinator, your family planner for how many live births to ‘end of life’ decisions and the final arbiter on how ‘old’ old really is, they now get the rest of your pay. In short, because we are lily livered, sniveling, spoiled, stupid and entitled children the government will shoulder the responsibility we have systematically volunteered to give to them. How you may ask?
We got greedy and needed a baby sitter for free. That would be the education system. From pre-school to college from age 2 to 23 the government gives us tax credits, provides the public schools, feeds the kids breakfast and lunch, teaches them academia and social classes. The kids learn how to read condom labels, do the math to determine how much they need for medicinal marijuana, learn virtual geography that comes in handy on My Space and Facebook, how to dress to impress. [I know, in our day it was short tight skirts and today it is big baggie pants.] Phys Ed is now ‘recreational drugs’. We have grown to appreciate the various meanings of ‘crack’. We have crack: the drug, crack: that which you see when the baggy pants fall or the hip huggers do not quite cover the hips and lastly those who use Blackberry phones and devices are ‘crack’berry freaks! On week ends we drop the kids off at the mall and let store personnel, food courts and Hollywood keep them occupied.
Morality has become a naughty, politically incorrect word. We are to ‘embrace’ the differences. We ‘the baby boomers’ -- those of us who detested the ‘establishment’ when we were teens -- wound up handing our lives and our kids lives right over to the very thing we struggled so hard to break free from as kids! Now the ‘establishment’ has loomed so large and whose tentacles are so far reaching and all encompassing there is a stranglehold on everyone of us. This all happened as our personal opinions and individuality eroded and gave way to ‘groupthink’ with ‘social behavior’ no longer innately understood but being dictated to us and it is not a pretty picture. The Bible cautions: “Woe to those who are saying that good is bad and bad is good…” [Isaiah 5:20]
Where does it all end? Or, when? If not soon, never! Independence, individuality and freedom will first disappear as a reality and likely either evolve into some other meaning; foot noted in some ‘radical’ history book or disappear from dictionary.com forever. The two party system will probably ‘change’ to ‘no party’ or ‘class’ systems as the migration from a democratic republic morphs into totalitarian, or worse. We have the ‘dog days of summer’ NOW to work out freedom, our rights, our independence and our individuality. We need to get out and engage in letter writing campaigns first to the elected officials and then to our neighbors. We need to make sure we are not so conditioned by the government in our apathetic malaise that we do not notice the tanks rolling down our streets as ‘wrong’! We need to understand there is a distinctive plan to engage in age discrimination, in exploiting vulnerabilities, and in being recreated in someone else’s image! The healthcare reform as it is being touted currently is a means to an end, but what end and for whom? I will let the more informed paint that one.
Folks, please do not draw comfort in considering yourself one of the ‘silent majority’! We cannot afford to be silent. As the majority we need to make sure our input reaches all the way to the halls of the White House, Capital Hill and reverberates all the way back to the sovereign states and their respective Capital institutions! The architects of the greatest government since the Theocracy of Israel designed a form of government from the bottom up with the majority of the power in the ‘people’ with limited power with the government. We MUST protect the inalienable right to LIFE, LIBERTY and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS and protection comes only from activity. If you do not USE it you WILL LOSE IT!
All you folks who were rightly and deeply concerned about your civil liberties under Bush and who opted for ‘change’ in Obama, it is understood that you in no way dreamed this would be the change you would get. If you were to compare the two, and you shouldn’t have to, it may be hard to turn a blind eye to the 6 months of nearly irreversible damage done to this country since the first of the year in comparison to the 8 yrs of Bush. The percipient ones understood Bush facilitated change with his policies, however such prescient knowledge no doubt lacked full spectrum affects of how the change would ultimately be realized. Hindsight, as they say is 20/20.
As in any storm the winds change directions, sometimes from one way to another other times circular - counter and then clock wise. The winds of change unleashed in November of 2008 were not correctly perceived as foreboding by the masses. They missed the signs. On January 22 or 2009, however, the winds began blowing out from the White House first to the nation then to the world and when the dust settles Lady Liberty may be looking at the skeletal remains of a once truly FREE DEMOCRACY.
You have the power to alter the course of this storm. Push back by writing letters and sending them. Forget about emailing the elected folks they do not have working emails but have forms where they tell you but do not listen. You can try calling but the interns, their staff, by now have grown accustomed to the disgruntled and dismayed among us and likely are no longer taking detailed messages, if any at all and you can figure it is being delivered through a filter of their perceptions of the caller. That is of course if you can even get through. Contact your local papers, television and radio stations and let them know you really want to know when the Town Hall Meetings for discussion of healthcare reform will be held so you can make an appearance in support of slowing down the process and giving it time for legitimate and creative debate. Keep their news desk folks and their editors busy answering and reading your concerns. Tell the media and elected officials to look at models like Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic and see how to replicate their healthcare. Don’t look at MassCare, Canadian or UK Social systems as models. Be active in whatever way you can – you may be able to continue to enjoy the life you have carved out for yourself. You will be able to snuggle up in your comfort zone and feel like it is all yours. If you don’t do anything you have been promised by Ms. Obama that the president will make sure you are no longer IN your comfort zone but ENGAGED in what he has decided should be your life! No! Uh ah! We the people will exercise our freedoms of speech and self expression!
WAKE UP! REALLY, BEFORE IT IS TOOOOOOOOOOOOOO LATE!
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