We Want Our Country Back

We want our country back. What an interesting mantra.

Exactly where (or when) do we want our country back to?

Do we want it back to where Blacks had to drink from a different water fountain?

Do we want it back to where there were no usable roads?

Do we want it back to the good old days when 11 year olds were forced to work 80 hours a week with no rights and little pay?

How about all the way back to when everyone "owned" at least a couple of other people?

What is it that we want back?

Do we want back the days when even adult workers had no rights? How does an 80 or 90 hour workweek with no overtime pay, no minimum wage, no sick time, no holiday pay, and no weekend sound? When the owner of a company could keep his employees under his thumb by paying them very little, and then extending loans to keep them working there? That song "I owe my soul to the company store" wasn’t just a song.

Oh, I know. Do we want back the days when everyone had to carry a weapon because there weren’t enough police to keep order?

Or do we want it back to where woman couldn’t vote, and could barely get a job?

How about we do away with all those costly government programs. We don’t need any federal agency to police our food and drugs. Those companies that provide that stuff will police themselves adequately. Just like the peanut butter folks a couple of years ago. Or the Vioxx folks.

Where, or when, is it exactly that we want our country back to?

How about the days when a person could be turned out of a hospital ER to die on the sidewalk just feet away because he had no insurance or cash to pay for treatment?

What DOES "We Want Our Country Back" mean, exactly?

Foreign Aid... Local Aid

With all the debates over the economy, everyone seems to forget the human element in all this. A person who loses their income source is not far away from losing their place to live. Take, for instance, a woman in Fort Worth who is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. She cannot obtain a release to return to work, so she has zero income. All of the churches and charitable organizations have run out of money due to the abject financial situation our nation is in. She faces eminent eviction, with no prospects of a place to stay. Many other people faced with job loss face the same outcome. The major problem here is that an eviction goes on one’s credit reports, making it nearly impossible to obtain any kind of living quarters. Are we, as a nation, comfortable with expanding the homeless population? In light of the fact that we spend over 100 billion dollars a year on FOREIGN aid, it is unconscionable that we allow so many of our own citizens to fall through the cracks. It is not the responsibility of my tax dollars to house and feed someone in Africa when so many of my fellow Americans so greatly need help. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with helping folks around the planet, but I do NOT think we should be doing it when we have needs here at home. As long as there are ANY homeless Americans, or in any other kind of need, any money that we, as a nation, send to foreign lands should dry up. Once we have our own people taken care of, then, and only then, do we need to worry about the rest of the planet’s population.