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Somehow I don't think I have long columns in me anymore. I used to be able to whip out 1,800- 2,200 words in an afternoon, but then I was living up in the woods of Northern Minnesota where you had months of no possibility of yard work, because your yard was under a couple feet of snow, and thoughts of your garden only came out of seed catalogs. Now I am in North Florida, with a year-round garden, a nice woodworking shop that calls to me daily, and it feels good to hide in my work, and let those long involved thoughts dwindle to short paragraphs that get to the point a lot quicker. What Kind Of Attitude Would You Have?
Last week on a Jacksonville, Florida television station, they reported that the local school district had 2,000 homeless children attending their schools. They had no estimate of the total population of Jacksonville's homeless child population. Bishop Ken Carder, the keynote speaker at the Abolishing Poverty Conference noted: "One in six Americans is either poor or designated low-income, he said. For the first time this fall, one million homeless children will enroll in U.S. public schools." So, what kind of attitude would you have if you were one of the million kids attending school with no home to go to after school or on the weekend or on holidays or during the summer? For many of those children, going to school means eating at least one or maybe two meals a day they probably wouldn't have if they were wandering the streets with their parent or parents. I know if I had grown up homeless, there would be a good chance that I would now be an ex-con, or maybe I would be doing Life without Parole. I was blessed to have parents who loved me and gave me a place to live that was more than just shelter, but rather a home. Do you trust what President Obama or any other politician in Washington says? I don't. The other day Obama was saying that he does not spy on us, but there are constant reports on NSA spying on Americans. Then, Obama comes out saying that we should have a conversation about our government spying on us. He just said that the government wasn't spying on us, and now he wants a conversation about the spying. No, I don't trust what he says any more. In fact, it's getting to the point that Republicans no longer trust Republican politicians and Democrats no longer trust Democratic politicians. Nobody trusts anybody. People are finally learning that neither political party is looking out for them. There is a slow meltdown going on at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. Thousands of tons of contaminated water are flowing into the ocean. Scientists and environmentalists are shouting warnings about what is happening, but have you heard about it? Didn't think so. The media are keeping their voices silent. Wonder why. Washington keeps playing games with the way they figure out our inflation rate, and they keep telling us that inflation is at less than 2% a year. By saying that, Social Security and disability payments go up very little. However, every American knows their money does not go as far as it did the year before, and many people are forced to choose cheaper and fewer products because of this. We the people know that inflation is far greater than 2% because our wallets are telling us so. But Washington thinks we don't know. Every week more American troops are being killed in Afghanistan. "The troops" translates into sons, daughters, fathers, mothers — real people. More and more Americans from the left and the right are coming to the realization that our politicians continue this war to keep the profits flowing to rich Americans who own our defense industry. We have not had an update on the number of our troops wounded in combat since September of 2012. Troop deaths are no longer news, and there is constant talk of moving our Afghan War to a new country. This from Vetfriends.com:
The United States is on a Wartime economy, and we have been since the start of WWII. Washington will do whatever it takes to keep our country at war because it fills the pockets of the rich industrial complex companies who will in turn fill the pockets of those politicians. Washington will spy on its citizen, and "fix" the numbers they use to report on our economy. They will do anything needed to keep war-time profits flowing, and if that takes the dying and maiming of tens of thousands of young Americans and the killing of hundreds of thousands or even millions of those we start wars with, well that is what they think is a cost of doing business, and they don't care. |
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