This week I return to the U.S. for my semi-annual visit with family and friends. I thought it was an appropriate time to vent my thoughts on recent events and happenings in my country from the prospective of one who has been viewing things from afar for the past four years. I welcome any and all comments.
Wake Up America
Regardless of where you live in the U.S. or what stratus of the society you exist in, percentage wise about one in every six people you are exposed to every day is living at or below the poverty level. Surprisingly, a large percentage of them ARE employed. And many more are just one illness, or car repair or a ‘you are fired’ from joining those poverty ranks. You probably know some of them. The war on poverty is no longer confined to that ‘other world’. Wake up America!
We continue to pour money into other countries, many of whom don’t even like us. For example, do you know how many millions of dollars we gave Venezuela last year, in effect propping up that clown Hugo Chavez who spews his ‘American hatred’ world-wide? And I will bet you that we gave more to some foreign country (that not one of us can find on the map) than we spent on our own kids’ education. Wake up America.
In the ‘70s the Department of Energy was established because the U.S. was suddenly jolted with the realization that we had become dependent on foreign oil. It was time, we realized, to start using our own considerable energy sources, and the new DOE was going to insure we became less dependent on foreign oil and their governments. Today many of those countries, with the funny names that we had barely heard of in the ‘70s, are filthy rich supporting handsomely their entire population in a ‘welfare state’ manner that is unparalleled in the history of the world. By comparison, the DOE has evolved as a massive ‘money-gobbling’ bureaucracy that has produced tons of rules, regulations and restrictions on U.S. energy companies, and the U.S. is more dependent on foreign oil, not less, than it was in the ‘70s. And over that same period of time, we have continued to discover more and more untapped energy sources of our own. And they tend to remain untapped as environmental activists clamor and U.S. Senators talk ‘earnestly’ of more exploration while decreeing that it not be done off-shore of their Hyannis Port estates. Continuing to lose ground in the ‘energy war’ threatens our very existence as a nation. The disrupted mating habits of the next ‘snail darter’ do not! Wake up America!
My generation of military professionals spent years ‘Post-Viet Nam’ writing after-action reports and conducting research studies under a broad umbrella called ‘Lessons Learned’. We the military shared the country’s concern that we as a nation not make another “Viet Nam’ mistake in the future. Yet now our seemingly endless forays in both Iraq and Afghanistan find us mired down in conflicts we cannot win and situations that seemingly have no proper resolutions. All those ‘after action’ reports must have become door stops because we made exactly the same mistakes. We have expended billions of dollars in these efforts with little to show from them except growing anti-American feelings from those we are supposedly helping and an admittedly only temporary disruption of the enemies’ (terrorist organizations’) agendas. And to our national discredit we have again expended the lives of thousands of our nation’s young, and permanently altered the lives and futures of thousands more who ‘survived’ the battle fields but not the predictable long-term personal collateral damage to both them and their families – cost that will continued to be paid for years. Wake up America!
I am concerned that America seems to have lost its way. There seems to be no portion of the country that we know and love that is not coming apart at the seams. We have watched for decades as the federal government took over major portions of our economy with ‘new’ ideas, programs and agencies, all in the name of providing stability and equality to our lives and to promote our well being. And whether it is energy, education, retirement or any other program you can think of, the governments performance in these areas is such that, if they were a small business, they would not be able to get even a small loan from the SBA based on their performance. Yet given that history, we then sit by and watch while the government takes over a sector of our economy that is as vital as healthcare, with a massive bill that few of the legislators had read, none even marginally understood, and which a year later is still producing surprise after surprise. It appears to me that all the avenues from Wall Street to Main Street are in bad repair, approaching impassible, with the only ‘improvements’ seen in the future being the construction of more toll booths. Wake up America!
We now find ourselves coming up on a presidential election year with unemployment at near record levels, the economy crumbling around us both here and abroad, the new housing market dormant, mortgage foreclosures about to soar through the roof, an education system that continues to erode, state governments cutting programs and services attempting to make ends meet, and local governments just flat ‘going under’. We none-the-less continue to allow the present political discourse to be driven by politicians and pundits. Do you really think it is relevant whether Perry is an evangelical or Romney a Mormon, or Bachmann is pro-abortion, or any other such political triviality – relevant enough at this point in time to even discuss it. If so, please go up and read the opening of this paragraph again. Wake up America.
‘What can we do?’ you ask. I suggest we can do what Americans have always done when the country faced a crisis - what it did during the Revolutionary War, and during World War II, and to an only slightly lesser degree, after 9/11. Americans stood up, got involved, made things happen, and, more importantly, made things right! No, I am not talking about joining the Tea Party movement. I am not talking parties at all – neither Democrat, Republican, Progressive, Tea nor Tupperware. They are all in my opinion, to one degree or the other, part of the problem, and there traditional approaches are hardly projected any probability of providing solutions. Yes, the Tea Party movement had an impact in the last congressional election cycle, but I will contend they did not provide ‘the answers’. However, I think they did provide a clear blueprint of how change can be forced – the Tea Party successes provided a pretty clear view of ‘the questions’ that need to be addressed.
Our country cannot tolerate another administration or congress that does not know how to get things done – or people who do not have a track record of getting the job done. We as concerned Americans have to get serious. I also think that means we have to put aside our own personal pet projects and favorite issues. The days of voting (or not voting) for someone strictly because of their position on a single issue (or two) has passed us. We should be looking for thinkers and do-ers, people who can and are willing to confront the unknowns of our future, not someone who merely passes our acid test on religion, abortion, or height/weight requirement. There is not room in the current environment and discourse for intransigence. That is one of the problems in Congress now – several hundred legislators all with certain subjects that are not even open to debate. Something as simple as signing a ‘No Tax Increase’ pledge indicates to me a failure to recognize the complex nature of the world we live in and ignores the degree to which modern technology can turn our world upside down in short order. It also leads to knee-jerk rejection to cutting out a big government subsidy that long ago outlived its usefulness because that could be considered a tax increase. I do not need any more robotic responses in congress. How about you? Wake up America.
You may or may not have noticed at the start of this plea I made several references to things ‘we had done’- spent billions on foreign aid, gone to war, established bigger and bigger government programs. I purposely did not say ‘the federal government did’ those things, because my over-riding point in this entire discussion is that we cannot separate ‘we’ from the federal government, at least we cannot any longer. We put them there and we have to lose the ‘hostage syndrome’ mentality. If your congressmen started getting hammered by a significant portion of their constituents on a regular basis, do you think they would be able to just write off the callers as a ‘kook fringe’ and just vote their conscience? How many of you have ever sounded off to your congressman? How many regularly? Somewhere along the line, we put the ball in the other court, and have not been to concerned about the fact that it was not hit back. It is time to go get it. Wake up America. Before it is too late.
Larry I. Matthews
Lieutenant Colonel, USAF (Ret)
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