This is a long article written by my daughter, Meghan, but as a proud father I thought it needed to be posted. From this point on the words are hers but the thoughts are those of many of us. Let me state that this is purely my opinion, un-researched and totally biased because I don’t want someone else to think for me. I may not have spent hours studying the Constitution but from what I remember, we elect one man to oversee things and be our figure head. He’s got some power and he can be persuasive but he has to convince a whole lot of other people to really get anything done. He is our executive branch. Then we have nine people in black robs who sit behind a big bench who are supposed to interpret our laws and see if they match up with our founding documents. They’re the judicial branch. Then we have 535 men and women who we voted for who make our laws and basically run our country - let’s be honest. There are more of them because they are supposed to represent the other 300 MILLION people in this country. This is our legislative branch. These are the individuals I’m mad at. One man does not cause all the problems in this country; he effects them but does not cause or cure them by himself. Nine people who have been selected and vetted make mistakes but they have to politely and articulately explain themselves. And if they make a mistake, in 20 years we’ll have another nine people who can hopefully rectify that mistake. When 535 individuals can’t see past the far side of their own desk, we have a problem, a very serious problem. Like the government shutting down for instance. There is a story of the two woman who claimed to be the mother of the same child. They brought the child before the king who ordered the child killed. The woman who protested this saying that she would rather the other woman take the child than have it killed was given the child. This is because she was willing to put the child’s needs before her own. If we relate this back to the topic at hand, 535 members of Congress are the women and the citizens and country as a whole is the child. Unfortunately for us, we have skillfully elected 535 individuals who would rather see us cut in two bleeding on the floor than to allow the other side to “win”. Our government has gotten to the point where without drawing lines in the sand, they don’t know where they stand. I am an Independent. In the last presidential election, I voted for Colin Powell. Did he run? No, and I’m well aware that some of you may look at this as a “wasted vote” because he didn’t have a chance of winning. But was it really wasted? As a citizen I have the right to vote for the individual who I deem to be the most deserving. That right is guaranteed to me because of that little blank box at the bottom of the ballot where I get to write it in. I felt that there was a better option than the ones the Republicans and Democrats chose for me. Mr. Powell served our country honorably, is well spoken, admired throughout the world, and is very intelligent (and honestly, I secretly hoped that he would line Congress up in front of our military so they can see the faces of the men and women whose pay checks they cut every time they can’t play nice). When I vote for my senators and representatives, I vote for the individual whose name I don’t recognize. And this is my reasoning: I don’t watch the news, read anything more than the funny pages of the paper, or listen to NPR so if I know your name, I figure that you already wasted way too much of my money in the first place. Is this the best method? Probably not but since I’m already thoroughly disappointed in my government, what’s the worst that could happen? When I was little, my brother and I were in the middle of a huge argument, much like most siblings have been at one time or another. One of my parents came and separated the two of us and we had to sit in opposite corners of the room until we could say we were sorry and explain why the other might have been right. Whether or not we believed in what we were saying, we were forced to look at it from the other’s perspective. I think that more than ever, the Republicans and Democrats need to sit in different corners of the hallowed halls built on the back of our country’s history until they can say something nice about the position taken by the other side. If you’re going to act like children, you should be treated like children. And since most of them were born in a time when it was still legal to chase the brains of your child from their butt back up to their heads with a spanking, I think it’s time that we ask them to bend over.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:48:02 +0000
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