Think about where we were four years ago.
Our soldiers were serving tour after tour in Iraq and getting blown to bits even though no one could tell us why we were in Iraq; the 9/11 terrorists were mostly from Saudi Arabia and we couldn’t find Osama bin Laden. We lived in constant fear of another 9/11.
The economy was terrible: home foreclosures skyrocketed. Houses lost their value dramatically. So many people were filing bankruptcy our leaders changed the bankruptcy laws to prevent people from filing. My lawyer quit doing bankruptcy entirely because the laws governing it made filing complicated beyond belief.
Our vice president shot a man in the face and said it was an accident. If you shot someone in the face, do you think anyone would believe it was an accident unless you could prove you were drunk?
Federal spending was higher than at any time in our country’s history. We were spending an awful lot of money on the war in Iraq but all we got for that money was more veterans with traumatic brain injuries, horrible burns and disfigurements, post-traumatic stress disorder, and missing arms and legs. Military suicide rates went up and up.
Normally a war stimulates our nation’s economy because tax dollars are buying beans and bullets, weapons, uniforms, and other supplies Americans manufacture. War creates jobs. But during the war in Iraq, our economy grew worse while private contractors like Halliburton grew rich.
We were internationally shamed by the photographs of Abu Ghraib tortures our soldiers committed under the U.S. flag.
America didn’t feel like America anymore. We didn’t stand for truth, justice, and the American way. We stood for torture and “accidental” shooting, and people being thrown out of their homes. We let the poorest among us endure blistering heat without water, food, medicine, or shelter for three days when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
Detroit nearly went bankrupt because no one could afford to buy new cars except for the few rich. Most Americans were driving cars that, on average, were eight years old.
Despite the horrors of the war in Iraq, young men and women volunteered to go, for two reasons. First, they believed they were defending their country. Second, young people could not find good jobs that paid a living wage with health and dental care.
America spent and spent for war, eating up the budget surplus we had and driving us into monstrous debt.
When Obama first campaigned for president, the opposition made much of his fussy black former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Obama was crucified over the pastor’s comments. But Obama made a racism speech that showed citizens his skin color was of little concern. He said, “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas.”
He talked about “… [M]y white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me … a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street….”
When Obama’s opposition could no longer shout fear of having a half-black man in the White House, they began calling him a Muslim, as if being a Muslim automatically makes a man a terrorist. Timothy McVeigh was not a Muslim, yet he blew up an Oklahoma City office building, killing FBI agents and children in a daycare center. Terrorism has no particular religion.
In the past four years, we got out of the war in Iraq. Our soldiers found and executed Osama bin Laden; he was in Pakistan, not Iraq. Home sales are finally on the upswing, and we have 4.5 million new jobs.
We still have much work to do to recover from the damage done in the past. Obama inherited an awful mess. He has not accomplished everything he set out to do, but he is swimming against the current with a Congress packed with opposition to his efforts. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, “Every new president inherits headaches, but when President Obama came to office, he inherited an entire emergency room.”
We still have much to do. Our returning veterans need huge amounts of care. We need more jobs, and Obama wants to give tax breaks to companies that create jobs in America instead of in other countries.
We are on the right path, but the previous administration did so much damage, we cannot fix it all overnight.
Give Obama a chance to continue the good work. Think hard about where we were four years ago. Are we better off? You bet we are.
Please post a link to your newspaper so I can submit this as a letter to the editor.