Posted by
VectorRector on Tuesday, October 07, 2008 12:40:01 AM
When I was little, our family lived out in the country (so to speak). There were always critters around that I wanted to rescue, and adults were always telling me how to go about it.
“Don’t touch a baby bird or its mother will abandon it.”
n “If you take a baby kitten from its mother too young it will die.”
n “Don’t help a butterfly out of a cocoon or it won’t have the strength to survive on its own.”
And so forth. As I grew up I found that some of these things were true and others weren’t.
When I was in about the fourth grade I remember seeing “Bambi” and starting a petition in my area to protect baby deer. Women answered the door at the first couple of houses I visited with my hand-written proposal and they probably didn’t want to discourage me so they signed on the line. Then I went to a house where a man answered the door. He took time out of his day to point out that if we stopped hunting deer we would be overrun with them in no time. He showed me his garden and spoke about how he wouldn’t have near as many vegetables to feed his family and share with his friends if deer were allowed to proliferate. I remember telling him I wanted to help these “defenseless” creatures and he said that not only were they made to be in the wild and are hardly defenseless, but they can also carry diseases and can hurt us. (The front fender of my car can attest to that after being struck by a deer -- which lived to run on back to the woods after causing nearly $3,000 in damage to the vehicle. Defenseless my foot.)
After getting "schooled", I left his house and didn’t go anywhere else. I was done with trying to propagandize my misguided ideas. I learned to look at things from another perspective -- a lesson that has served me well all throughout my life. As I watch the liberals (which, as a former journalist, I used to be a card-carrying member of), it’s like they’re believing the wives’ tales and no teacher ever sat them down and told them the downside to protesting, calling for bailouts and rescues, and taking away qualification requirements for loans and credit with only one-sided information. They’re like that little kid who’s going door to door trying to convince people that things need taking care of when they really don’t. We don’t need to help undocumented citizens get credit cards, we don’t need to make special allowances for certain UNQUALIFIED minority groups to get house loans with no down payment that they could not afford on their credit scores alone; and we certainly didn’t need to throw billions of dollars to bailout a finance industry problem with NO ACCOUNTABILITY provisions whatsoever. This scenario just sets us up for a “nanny state” where the government tells us what to think and bails us out of trouble when it’s created. How’d that work out for most of Europe? What are the tax rates there, again? Oh, and how’s the UK coping with their flood of foreign nationals, again? Which one is demanding new standards rather than accept long-standing British rule and tradition?
America stands at the edge of a cliff and is teetering. I picture this horrific costume of a large group of people sharing a costume of an amoeba. One person in the amoeba is the finance "arm", one is the integrity arm, another is the culture arm, one is the government arm, and so on. If one arm goes over the edge, the entire entity goes, and man, does it look like some of the cohabitants of the costume are tired of staying out of the precipice. I keep thinking that any minute now, one of these arms of the structure that undergirds our nation is going to collapse and drag the rest of us down with it. Yet I feel like a voice in the wilderness when I talk to people about the urgency of these problems.
I’m amazed that the people who know and own truth aren’t standing up and voicing it. America has been governed FOR THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE since its inception, but in the last couple of decades elected officials have forgotten that and we have been lax in demanding accountability. I am pushing for discipline here and now. My elected officials (and some in my state that I didn’t get to vote for) are hearing from me weekly. What accountability is going to be put in place regarding the bailout funding? Who’s getting money from our nation overseas and why? What are these nations doing with it? With our economy in the dire straits everyone keeps telling us it’s in, are we considering shutting off or at the very least cutting back foreign aid? Why is the UN still based in this nation? They don't stand with us on many votes and provide hate mongers with a venue and an international audience for their bashing of our allies, our nation, and our leaders.
As a person who is obsessed with politics, I’ve decided to quit the victim mentality that so many conservatives seem to have toward government. I hear educated people from the right say there’s nothing we can do about the situation and it is what it is. That is not an attitude that forged this nation from wilderness, and I refuse to buy into it. This is MY country and I get to have a say in how it runs. So do you. Never forget that.