Monday, October 21, 2013

It's About Us


Our greatest generation is going fast to meet their maker and seek their promised salvation. They have felt some trepidation about it too, being taught to love life above the expediency of politicians. They sacrificed a lot for the greater good of their fellows to be the preservers of freedom in the world. Liberty rested in their hands! They knew it and rose up to seek the continuity of the freedoms they had enjoyed their whole lives up to then. The generation before theirs had risen to that task as well. Unfortunately the peace that had been won was not to last. The punishment meted out against the aggressors of that time was too steep a price to pay, resentments ran high.

Then came along a charismatic speaker to the fore, feeding the resentments; a divider and propagandist non-pareil who whipping up a generation of punished people, ordinary people, to feel righteousness in their resentments of the generation before. He then found another group on which to place blame. Putting blame toward a particular ethnic group, the Jewish people and culture, scapegoating them for their dire circumstances and poorness due in truth to the onerous burdens of restitution for WWI.

Most Jewish people were just working people like all others, values similar, but also a degree of different. It seemed to be enough to be made into a targeted foe of the Nazi Party, not a real foe but a convenient one. The tragedy of the holocaust and WWII ensued. When America got involved it was tough going, but eventually there was enough military strength to overcome the axis powers soundly and the peace was won. Then we had to keep the peace.
 

There have been other wars and policing actions at times around the world. But no other generation of heroes was ever feted and made over as much as that one generation has been in the life of our nation. Now we are at a crossroads once again and have to decide:

 

 Who are we now?

 Are we the defenders of our fellows, or are we the expedient foe?

 Are our leaders leading us in the direction of another war?

 Is the GOD of today a lesser leader than the GOD of those generations before us had?

 When we see vile acts being visited upon our fellow men and women do we hurt less?

 I think not.

With our communications being practically in real time now it becomes even more urgent to us to right the wrongs we see. Yet we are drawn into wanting to act decisively, accurately, and accountably, and we are not seeing that quality of leadership being exhibited nowadays. With more questions than answers we see our leadership needs going unmet. Our confidence is shaken.
Our resources are being misused and squandered before our eyes and not being utilized in a judicious manner. Our challenge may be to remonstrate that the benefits our generation has garnered from our parents' and grandparents' willingness to pitch in to further the advantages furnished through those sacrifices that we are worthy of them.
 
It does continue today. Young people are willing and able to sacrifice for the causes of freedom and the nation's interests. That brings me to my motive for writing today about failure of leadership at the highest levels, punishing those that do the most to defend us and our liberty.

 


During the recent governmental shutdown the darkness cast from Washington D C out across this nation showed the American people, the bureaucratic position was to make suffering of our veterans the showpiece of their ineptitude in resolving the most inane of issues, much less the truly big issues plaguing our nation today!

 
I visited our local zoo one warm afternoon, to see some new exhibits that have been installed. They were very nice; our extra tax dollars are being well spent there. We went to see the sea lions and orangutans, the giraffes and the condors. We went into the rain forest exhibit and I stopped for a moment's rest in the relative coolness of the muted shadows inside the doors. Another woman was doing the same. Her husband and children moved on ahead of us and my companions did too. We chatted as we watched them all go ahead on the pathway into the moist air. She said she needed to rest her knees as she had stress fractures in both of them and still was in need of more surgeries and therapies to fully heal. I must have looked surprised at that. She is a beautiful young woman. How could that be? She had been injured during training of some kind in Afghanistan, she said. She was afraid the VA funding for her continuing treatments would be cut and that that would devalue her quality of life forever. I said I hoped that wouldn't happen to her, thinking to myself that it had better not! I could see the 3 active kids, ahead of us all, with wonder in their eyes and curiosity in their antics, excited to see and do new things. Those kids need their mother to be able to do all the things that moms do! We moved on then, our respite over. But, our encounter there stuck to my heart and to my mind. Mulling over what she'd said and sad that she should have to be fearful of not getting the treatments she needs, breaks my heart.

I know several other young veterans that are also in such a place, not knowing with any confidence that the promises of the contract they made with the USA would be fulfilled, after they had fulfilled their duty to their own side of the agreement. I can't help but be more and more irked by the utter callousness and failure of those in the seats of power to be continuingly deaf to the needs of so many that have gone, at their direction, to meet any and all demands put upon them; those who are regularly going above and beyond mere requirement to perform admirably the tasks given them.
 
 

 These contracts must be met!

The high roller on Capitol Hill must be smitten with their own hubris in thinking they would not have to fulfill their part of those contracts.
 

What with the caution-to-the-wind spending they do, they have forgotten their own jobs. To do what they have been hired to do, by, We the People. Defending our borders, enforcing our laws, and to make a budget to do those things and to live within that budget. It is not their job to do much else. It is not their job to regulate everything that we do, not what we eat, nor what we think say or express. The Capitol Hill crowd, with all the cronies and hangers on there, seem to be thinking that their behaving as martinets is acceptable.
Wrong!

Small minds, wielding power over others, doesn't change the fact of their small mindedness. It is but one small line item in the over bloated spending that Capitol Hill does every year. I do think that we could cut a few pork barrel items to take care of our veterans. OR, do the martinets think that would be Un-American?
It is now up to us, to step up to the task and be the great generation of the new century, to emulate our forefathers. To demand and posit for our people what is the most important to us, self-determination! In liberty and in justice for all our people; not to be trampled upon for the divisive greed on capitol hill nor set aside for this group or that.



 Power lust is the road of ruin as is evinced through all recorded history.
 
MA.W 2013

 

 

 

 
 
 
 

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