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December 1, 2011
With so many bad things happening all around us, it is easy to lose our mind and get carried away by our frustrations and failed expectations. Despite the Thanksgiving holiday that just passed and the upcoming Christmas, the cloud of despair and sadness over our country’s enormous problems such as: mounting debts, budget deficit, massive unemployment, home foreclosures, terror threats and a thousand other concerns, continues to hover above us like a pest.
And instead of helping ease our worries and pains, our Congressional leaders make us feel even worse. Their endless infighting and politicking consume much, if not all, of their time, taking them away from their real work and leaving them with absolutely nothing done. What a waste of taxpayers’ money! More than just a waste of money, what a waste of valuable time and opportunities to cure what’s ailing this country.
Given that the two political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are poles apart in almost if not all issues, does anyone still wonder why we’re stuck in this very precarious situation? How did politics in this country get to be so bad? Why can’t these parties even try finding a middle ground on issues that involve people’s welfare, let alone their basic necessities in life? How could members of the US Congress boldly declare that their party’s only objective was to see that this president would be a one-time president and get away with it? How could the people who elected them not be enraged by these leaders’ obvious disregard of their duties and their choice of politics over responsibilities to their constituents?
How can a party that has no qualms about cutting the average and poor Americans’ Medicare and privatizing Social Security, yet defend ferociously the tax cuts for the rich stand before its constituents, claim that it is following the will of the American people and escape getting booed, called out, or thrown out?
Why is it too difficult to tell the good from the bad or truth from lies? When a party chooses to cut spending by eliminating jobs like the firefighters’, teachers’ and policemen’s or by shutting down programs that help the sick and downtrodden but refuses to raise taxes on the top 1% of the people, and yet insists on saying it is protecting your welfare as a people, isn’t it obvious whose side (the 1% or the 99%) it is really on?
When a party decries big government that regulates corporations like banks, pharmaceuticals, oil, insurance, etc. which rake in billions of dollars but intrudes into people’s exercise of individual liberties, doesn’t it contradict itself and place its motives under suspicion?
When a party succumbs to intimidations of a power-wielding group and stops thinking on its own, when it allows itself to be threatened and sacrifices justice for support, when its judgment is suppressed by fear of reprisal or withdrawal of support by an influential party, then this party doesn’t have any right to exist as one.
Remember the lies they wove to justify invading Iraq? Weapons of mass destruction? Saddam’s Al Qaeda connection? The seduction that led us to believe going to Iraq would be just a cake walk? Eight years later, we found out quite the opposite. There were no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam didn’t have Al Qaeda connection. Thousands of Americans died and our country went from having billions of dollars in surplus to being trillions in deficit.
It’s true we have a long way to go before we see any positive change while on the road to recovery. But unless we remove our blindfolds and actually pay attention to what is going on around us sans our prejudices, we will never find the truth. If we continue to listen to one voice and refuse to open our mind to the possibility of finding the genuine truth in the opposite end of the spectrum, we will continue to be deceived and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
It isn’t that hard to uncover the truth these days. All we need to do is lose half of those biases we have to make room for fresh ideas. Exercise our judgment after hearing both sides and knowing the good from the bad. When juxtaposed together, these two opposing ideologies pretty much show their own strengths and weaknesses. Picking sides becomes easy to those who are willing to see the truth and abide by it.