My fellow Americans:
America is a better nation than it's leadership reflects.
Over the past few years we have seen a horrible decline in overall responsibility in our government. Many if not the majority of us nationwide fall in the political position of being fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The common wisdom has been that republicans are the party of social and fiscal conservativism, while the democrats are the party of "immorality", "breaking the bank" and "creating big government". I'm not going to rehash those arguements other than to state my opinion that it hasn't really been that way, but that is now irrelevant. America is looking for a way out of our current mess, and we're going to give it to them.
It's time for our leaders to get back to work.
Follow me below the fold for my view on some issues.
America isn't built upon the fat cats' money that they steal off our labor, and it also isn't built upon the backs of the welfare queens that live off of government handouts. THIS is the simple truth that is crying out for a voice in our society. The American work ethic does not exist in it's best form at either the top or the bottom - it exists in the middle, where we get up early in the morning out of a nice warm bed, put on our pants one leg at a time, get in our car or truck and go to WORK. It exists in us at the end of the week, or two weeks, or the month, when we get our pay and looks at our taxes and think "Well, the government took a chunk again, but I'd sacrifice that for my country more willingly if I thought they weren't wasting a bunch of it". Our workers aren't lazy. We shoulder the weight of the country every single day. From the guy who digs drainage ditches to the tech guy who slogs through a million lines of database code looking for one word out of place, we are nation of workers. I've done both.
This nation of workers is crying out for people to tell it like it is. No spin, no PR, don't try to sell it to me, it needs to sell itself by being the honest truth on our level. Here's a few nuggets of truth that I feel like I've learned by getting up and going to work every day, and then applying what I learned to the world of government.
1. Fighting is expensive, morally repugnant, and bad for business. It's also satisfying to beat the hell out of something from time to time, especially if it's bad guys that desperately need it. When you are forced to fight, you do it for the right reasons, because otherwise it isn't worth it. And for the record - the people understand that when the enemy is defeated and we take over the capital, that means the war is over. Most people realize we won the war and then SHOULD have done the job of occupying and securing Iraq well while they rebuilt their own nation, but we didn't have enough troops sent to do it.
War is serious business that needs to be done right if it's going to be done at all.
2. Government in general is the best way for us to work together towards common goal for society. It's also become an inefficient behemoth that wastes tons upon tons of our taxpayer money. The solution is neither to make it a larger behemoth, nor is the solution to drown it in a bathtub. The solution is apparent to anyone who has ever worked on HVAC equipment - you want to get the most you can out of the unit for the least money. The best heat pumps are high efficiency models that move a lot of air. The same is true of government - we want it to do the most work for the least money. Real workers deal with that equation every day, and it's well past time we made sure our government ran on the same basic idea. Efficiency.
Do as much as we can for ourselves and our neighbors without breaking the bank.
3. We'll trust the government a whole lot more when we know what is going on. We want open government because if somebody is having to sneak around about policies that affect the American people, then those policies are probably affecting us in a bad way. That's pretty simple.
Just tell the truth and follow the law.
4. Workers balance their checkbooks. We've figured out that there has to be more money coming in there is going out. That isn't a difficult concept to grasp, and yet our government has lived beyond it's means repeatedly, and laid on the generosity of lenders. Well, let's look at another basic truth the average American worker understands about this situation: Getting too far in debt sucks the life out of your budget. As debts mount and you have to pay them off, you start losing the ability to pay for other things that really need to be done. You either have to work harder, or something else in the budget has to be sacrificed. And on top of that, whoever lended you the money always wants a cut.
Balance the budget.
5. Workers want the best balance possible between work and play. They accept that some places on the earth are going to get dirty from all the work, but they expect that not to get all over where they play. If you want simple truth on how we feel about the environment, there it is. We don't expect a scrap yard to look like a rain forest, and we don't expect a lake to look like a garbage dump either. It obvious that there has to be somebody that draws the line between the two, and the best thing to do is for us all to work together to make sure the two don't meet. If I have to pay an extra buck to have somebody out there to make sure the tire I just had replaced on my car doesn't end up in the lake I fish in, I don't have a problem with that.
Don't trash the places we play.
6. Religion is important in our lives. It's also not good to get in to a long conversation or arguement about it with somebody you are trying to work with. The path we decide to take to try to get to heaven doesn't have a lot to do with whether the road has potholes, the school has funding, or there's enough money in the budget to pay the dogcatcher. Government and church are both ways we work together, and there's nothing wrong with churches helping the government with something that will help the church, or with the government helping the church with something that will help the government. It's when the government starts telling the church what to do, or the church starts telling the government to do that we get in to an arguement, and neither Christ's work nor Uncle Sam's work gets done.
Religion and government can work together, but not one for the other.
7. It's a good idea if you want to be safe - know who is around you. After 9/11, people really do care about securing our country from outside attack. Illegal immigration correctly looks like a huge hole in that security. If we can't stop mexican workers, how will we stop terrorists? But workers also can relate to other workers - no one wants to punish folks that were coming to America to work hard and try to live the American dream. We don't want to set up a guest worker program, we want to reward those who work hard with citizenship and a job as long as there are enough jobs to go around, and kick out the freeloaders. Workers are also smart enough to figure out that if employers stopped hiring folks who are illegal, then the problem of illegal workers would be solved. But they won't because they are greedy and willing to live on the labor of others.
Do we blame the backs that shoulder the loads? No - we blame the master holding the whip that's also holding the money to do the job right but won't because they are cheap and greedy.
8. Gay marriage is none of our business. We don't give a rat's tail if people make love to a chevy big block engine in the privacy of their own home, as long as they get up in the morning and go to work to build the country. The problem many people have with gay marriage is religion - in this case, government telling religion what they can and can not do, and vice versa (se #6). Here's a working man's solution to marriage - leave it up to the churches. Make ALL government sanctioned connecting of two people be called a civil union. That gets government out of the business of defining what to many people is a religious event. If a church is open enough to marry two gay people, then let them. If the congregation feels that's not what they want to accept, fine. All the government needs to know is that two workers are pooling their effort as a spousal team.
It's not the government's job to define marriage - that's up to the church.
9. Abortion is horrible, but so is a child born to a crack addict. It's a shame that when both sides are fighting to improve life, neither side can find common ground. The goal should be to reduce demand - something both sides agree on. It's my sense that most of us workers are just sick of both sides yelling and want these folks to put down their picket signs and pick up a hammer for an orphange.
Shut up about abortion and get to work making nobody want or need one.
10. America is a better nation than it's leadership reflects. That's the big truth workers get - we're smarter, more articulate, and a whole lot more sensible than our media or our leaders give us credit for.
America is a better nation than it's leadership reflects.
