Not a rant - more bewilderment than anything. We're burning our food (corn to ethanol), making light bulbs that contain enough mercury to poison 6000 gallons of drinking water and calling it more "environmentally" friendly, neglecting our strategic reserve but keeping ourselves dependent on foreign powers by not drilling our own oil, allowing our politicians to cater to extremely small numbers of individuals at the expense of the masses... what happened to America?
We used to have this mentality that we could do anything. More and more lately I hear from the people who are being laid-off talking like they are totally cut off - as though there is nothing else for them to do. When I was just out of college, I went and got two jobs making peanuts to pay my bills. Eventually things turned around and got better. I sure didn't wait for a union to straighten things out for me, and I sure didn't take welfare or unemployment. I took the cheapest housing I could, saved my money and ate cheaply. We used to have this mentality that the economy was the flow of money between people, not our life blood.
I know that things are very serious for people out of work, that they have children depending on the next paycheck to bring food to the table. But how many pay checks are going to beer, cigarettes, cable TV and the new car? How much is going to credit card interest? I know it's hard to change people, and I know it's hard to make ends meet when the money is slim to none. But there are a lot of things we have become lazy and slothful about that are easy to change with a little will power.
Optimism is one of those things. I hear so much pessimism in the media, and have been for so long that it has become a self fulfilling prophecy. The American people have come to confuse entertainment news media with reality. American news media has come to confuse fact reporting with entertainment. We've come to confuse public service with bringing home the most pork to the constituents. Has it occurred to anyone that we wouldn't need our duly elected representatives to bring more money back from Washington if we didn't send so much there in the first place? That if we applied critical thinking to what we see in the news that we might see it for the hype and thinly veiled social engineering that it is?
Folks, your government needs to go on a diet. Your politicians need to stop thinking of themselves as the elite class and start thinking of themselves as the servant class. The usual counter reasoning to this goes something like "but then nobody will want to serve". Not true. There are many people in this country who would gladly serve as a senator or congressman for NO pay. It used to be that those were the people who did so - it used to be that the compensation was a token payment, not intended to be a living wage (or better as it is by far today).
Along with our government going on a diet, so do we. We live a selfish, self defeating lifestyle. Pluck up folks. Not only is America more than the sum of its parts, each of us is more than our job description, more than the economy, our paycheck and how much stuff we have. My attitude has been do more than requested, more than required with more than I'm given. I think if we adopted an attitude of family, as in the American family, we would have a different view of our jobs, of our country, and of the economy. We would stop externalizing our problems and just take care of business.
A recent example comes to mind. My county along with 5 others on the Mad River valley passed local law to fund river cleanup to remove debris that contribute to flooding and erosion along the river. The same thing was voted down as a levy. The populace isn't interested in being taxed for it. Some how our County Commissioners got it done in a way that many folks are getting assessments in the mail, some for thousands of dollars. Twenty or Thirty years ago, the county would have asked for volunteers with chain saws to clean the log jams and dead-fall from the water ways. We've become so self interested, so selfish that the mere thought of volunteering to help our community for something mundane seems foreign to us. Our governments assume the need and right to tax us indirectly as a result of our self centered lifestyles. We have become so "me" focused that "we" are all suffering.
Aside from encouraging folks to turn back to God and the Christian principles of Stewardship (conservation - not environmentalism), selflessness and service to others, I want to encourage Americans to use the brains God gave them. Stop waiting for Washington to fix your problems. Stop waiting for the Union to fix your problems. Stop blaming other people for taking your jobs. Yes - there are hardships - but guess what - there are still Americans all around you who need work and need services. What a perfect microcosm. Global trade is fine when considering economies of scale, but when we are talking about local economic depression and regional recession, we need to address local and regional economic changes first. Global trade, foreign trade and jobs need to come second.
Fortunately perhaps, with the weakening dollar, we should see an influx of jobs in the future. But I wouldn't wait for it. Look around, step out of your comfort zone. Don't think like the drone the public school system trained you to be. Think like an American - like a person who can do anything they put their mind to. Don't believe the lie of entitlement. Believe in the promise of hard work, innovation and courage to step out and step up. Things are getting pretty bad - but the power to turn it around rests in our own idle hands. Wake up folks.