In a December 2000 meeting with congressional leaders, president-elect George W. Bush remarked, “if this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.”  Fortunately for us, we do not yet have a dictator for an executive, but that line has progressively blurred over the past few decades. 
    Since the Constitution was enacted as the supreme law of the land, the power of the president has grown exponentially.  This expansion of power has been variously justified by needs that were supposedly not anticipated by the framers of the constitution, but like Patrick Henry said of the constitutional convention, “I smell a rat.”
    In the past hundred or so years, the national legislature has gradually surrendered power to the executive branch, with a few exceptions such as the imposition of a presidential term limit in 1951.  Last year, our congressmen met for less than eighty days, and then only to rubber-stamp the policies of the president and his cabal of advisers.  The vast majority of disagreements were lodged along party lines.  If George W. Bush had been a Democrat like Bill Clinton, I have a feeling not one objection would have been raised by the Democrats.
    Since the attacks on September 11th, George W. Bush has been given free reign by both the press and congress to pursue war wherever he saw fit.  On September 25, 2001, congress passed a resolution authorizing the president to “deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11.”  Using such language, congress surrendered any right to oppose military action as long as the president painted his enemies with the word “terrorist,” regardless of whether they had anything to do with the attacks on America.
    Since 2001, Democratic members of congress have submitted two constitutional amendments to repeal the presidential term limit.  In bill after bill, President Bush has used so-called ‘signing statements’ to declare that he has the right to ignore the laws passed by congress, and his Attorney Generals have worked tirelessly to insulate him from the judicial branch. 
    Only now are some members of the legislature waking up to realize they have rendered themselves impotent.  I am afraid their efforts of reform will be too little too late, but there is always hope.
    The President of the United States is not infallible, nor should he or she be the “sole decision maker.”  Be very careful about who you support in the next presidential election, because they will wield unprecedented power once in office.  Make sure you are electing the president of a republic and not the dictator of an empire.        

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    Every day, advertisers tell us that we need more; more cars, more clothes, more food, more money, more jewelry, more music--more of everything, as if the United States is an all-you-can-eat buffet with a huge neon sign that says, “pig out!”
    I’ve never been a wealthy man.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I scrounged around for change in order to buy a meal at El Famous Burrito. 
    Sometimes, we could only afford a drink, so we would sit and talk while taking advantage  of our refill privileges.
    Those are the times I remember most vividly, when everything seemed scarce.  Money was more precious.  Food seemed more flavorful.  Even my free time was more valuable--when my friends and I would make the most out of the few hours we had to goof off after school
    Excess seems to sour everything.  The more you have of it, the less you appreciate what you have.  That seems like common sense, but that message is often lost today when we are taught that happiness increases alongside the amount of money or stuff you accumulate.
    Unfortunately, that’s not really the case.  As a consequence, we are driven to accumulate ever-increasing amounts of wealth and luxury, because what we have never seems to be enough.
    A few years ago, Barry Schwartz wrote a groundbreaking book on the subject called The Paradox of Choice.  In it, he argued that our culture of abundance actually robs us of satisfaction because being confronted by too many choices raises our levels of anxiety and makes us discontent.
    More importantly, he presented statistical analysis showing that, past a certain point, there is no quantitative correlation between increased happiness and increased wealth.  “Once a society’s level of per capita wealth crosses a threshold from poverty to adequate subsistence, further increasees in national wealth have almost no effect on happiness,” he explained (106).
    Rising rates of depression and metal illness attest to the fact that while we have grown wealthier as a society, our emotional health has suffered.  As Schwartz points out in his book, it’s precisely the things that limit our choices (to a certain extent)--friends, family, religious service, group acceptance--that make us the happiest.
    That is why I believe mass production has decreased our quality of life.  Take the simple example of bread.  Everyone eats bread.  The grocery store offers rows and rows of different factory produced breads.  Can you remember the last time you ate a piece of Wonder Bread and thought to yourself, “wow, that is really good!”
    No, of course you can’t.  Now, have you ever made your own bread?  Have you ever kneaded the dough, added your own butter and spices, and pulled it fresh from the oven?  I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.
    The reason for this difference is simple.  Anyone can just go to the store and buy mass produced bread.  Every loaf is the same.  Every loaf is flavorless and bland.  Your own home-made bread, however, is one of a kind.  It is something that you worked hard to produce, and there is nothing else quite like it. When you make something yourself, or when you only own a few of that thing, you tend to treasure it because it is unique or scarce.
    You see, what is at stake here is not only the quality of the products we buy, but our quality of life as well.  In a mass produced culture that equates happiness with excess, we find that we suffer from a poverty of value.

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    Originally, the concept of ideology was not very alarming.  The National Dictionary of 1939 defines ideology as “the science of ideas.”  But since that time, ideology has taken on other connotations, specifically of dogma and of a rigid, doctrinaire, black and white understanding of the world.
    After the Second World War, both communism and fascism were said to be ideologically driven, but the same could easily be said for a wide variety of political beliefs.  Ideology, as I will use the term, constitutes a rigid set of doctrines and ideas that frame a black and white view of the world. 
    Ideology substitutes conscious reflection and careful consideration with easily supplied axioms that are supposed to apply to all situations.  To an ideologue, ‘X’ will always supply an answer or explanation for every problem.  “One simply turns to the ideological vending machine,” Daniel Bell once wrote, “and out comes the prepared formulae.”
    For instance, an ideologue might argue (hypothetically) that Hilary Clinton will not (or did not) win the election because she is a woman, while ignoring any number of other reasons she may have not been appealing to the voters.  Similarly, ideologues would argue that Barack Obama did not win because he is black, or that John McCain did not win because he is old and unattractive.
    Everything is reducible to one convenient excuse that confirms the ideologue’s previous beliefs about the nature of the country’s voting population.  America is sexist, America is racist, or Americans don’t respect the elderly.  These explanations draw on certain facts about America--some Americans certainly are sexist, racist, ageist, or all three--and turn them into convenient universalisms that can be called upon to explain everything about society.
    Ideologues believe in an interpretation of history that places them as the culmination of a great historical project; as the sum total of enlightenment and progress.  Anyone who doesn’t agree with the ideologue is either ignorant, simpleminded, or dangerous.  They are unable to see how anyone could interpret history or current events in any other way.
    When their explanations fail, as they inevitably do, they fall back on conspiracies to explain why things haven’t gone their way.  It is never their own failings, but the result of an evil boogieman that confirms a need to purify the ideology and take it to even more extremes. Because this boogieman must always exist to justify the need for any particular ideology, the ideologue will dismiss any progress that is made toward their larger goals as evidence that those stride-making individuals have sold out, been co-opted by the system, or that the change itself was meaningless.  But of course, despite their criticism, they would never consider surrendering these advances.
    The ideologue will never admit that he or she could be wrong.
    The real problem with ideology, as I see it, is that it closes a person’s mind to other possibilities and solutions.  In some instances, this can be dangerous, as in the case of people who refuse all medical care or who refuse to feed certain foods to their infants that are essential for their healthy development.  A blind adherence to ideology could result in unnecessary death.
    “But Mike,” you say, “isn’t your anti-ideology an ideology?”  No. Remember our definition of ideology: a rigid, doctrinaire, black and white understanding of the world.
    To suggest that we should be flexible in our approach to the analysis of problems and in our solutions to those problems, and that we should view every situation with a multifaceted lens, is in itself inherently unideological.  It is the negation of ideology, and therefore cannot be the same.
    I am not saying that ideologies are never appealing, convenient, and therefore useful to some people.  Given their prevalence, many individuals have clearly chosen ideology as the governing influence over their thoughts and beliefs.
    I am saying that we must choose otherwise.  If we are ever going to find solutions to the problems that we face in the Midwest today, we must jettison black and white thinking and grasp onto what works.  As Franklin D. Roosevelt tried one idea after another to alleviate the pains of the Great Depression, so too must we find solutions that work and apply them where they are needed.  One solution need not apply to every area, nor does that solution have to be maintained if it ceases to be useful.
    In my column “Cast Down Your Bucket Here,” I praised Booker T. Washington as a great American.  I did so not just because of his devotion to his country, but because he was willing to work with people he did not agree with in order to help his locality prosper.  He did not point fingers or blame others for his own problems.  He taught that hard work and self-responsibility would elevate his people.  He knew that his situation demanded a moderate course, and so he did what he could with what he had.  There is nothing contemptable in that.
    Likewise, we must not succumb to extremism or ideologies that seek to divide us into neatly opposing categories.  We must chart a middle course.  We must be open to a wide variety of ideas from a diverse pool of thought.  We must not close ourselves off to anything that might help us simply because it seems distasteful.
    On the other hand, we must be careful not to slip too far over the edge and embrace a course that is wishy-washy and lacking in substance.  That is how we got into this mess in the first place.
    We must be firm in our convictions.  In the spirit of pragmatism, we must be ready to compromise at certain times and be steadfast at others.  There is no contradiction or weakness in possessing a variety of tools from which to draw.
    To fix a complex machine, an engineer must be able to draw from a full tool belt.  It would be insane to suggest fixing a computer when your only tool is a wrench.  Ideologues, on the other hand, would tell you that a wrench will always be the best tool for any job, no matter how multifaceted the job might be.
    My friends, like many periods of history, we face difficult times.  Should we tear society apart with ideology, or should we go a different way?  The choice is ours.

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    To me, a victim is someone who has endured the pain of life but continually dwells on their negative experiences, often believing their injuries to be worse than all others.  I have personally endured car accidents, chronic medical problems, the deaths of friends and family, a decade of depression, and years of physical and emotional abuse, yet I consider myself neither a victim nor a survivor.  I consider myself someone who has lived life, an experience that Thomas Hobbes correctly described as nasty, brutish, and short, although I would add that it can be beautiful at the same time.
    No one escapes life unscarred; yet there are those who insist on reminding everyone how much they have been wronged in the past.  It is hard, however, to quantify pain.  Who can say whether one loss or injury is worse than the next, especially when life contains an excess of pain and injustice?  
    It is true things that have happened to us in the past leave scars, and sometimes, as in my experience, those scars take years to overcome.  But once those scars are there it is useless to continue to dwell on them.  We should not lust for revenge against those who have wronged us in the past.  We should encourage them to realize those actions were wrong, just as we must realize when our own actions are harmful and wrong.
    In no way am I excusing behavior that is hurtful to others.  But once that pain has been caused, what is the point of compounding it by dwelling on the injury for the remainder of our lives?  Often times we have no control over the things that happen to us, but we do have control over the way we react to it.
    Victimization is an overreaction to events that have harmed us, and it does nothing but perpetuate the harm by dwelling on those events, preventing us from proposing reasonable solutions to the root problems by clouding our judgment with negative emotions, which often times leads to disproportionate retribution.  
    Because life is short, we should accept the nasty and brutish parts so we can also embrace the beautiful aspects of life.  I have too much to look forward to to dwell on something that happened eight or ten years ago, and I suspect that we all have too much at stake in the present to continually worry about what happened in the past.  
    Victims do not accomplish great things; great things are accomplished by strong men and women who accept hardship and overcome it in order to forge a better life.  

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    Family and parenthood are concepts many people of my generation are used to thinking of with negative connotations.  We are too busy pursuing careers or remembering bad experiences from our own childhood.  However, family and parenthood are of utmost importance to our society and should not be neglected.
    Family is our primary source of childhood socialization. More than any other influence, parents, consciously or not, pass down their behavior as well as their genes to their children. Young children soak up the example of their parents at a surprising rate.  Whether your children grow up to admire you and seek to emulate you, or hate you and distance themselves from you, your behavior as a parent sets the standard for the rest of your children's lives.
    It would be very naïve to think parental or spousal abuse, divorce, or familial adherence to dogmatic religious and political beliefs has no adverse effects on childhood social and intellectual development, because we know full well that both good and bad behaviors and attitudes are learned and socially transmitted from one generation to the next.  To deny the role parents play (or absence from that role) in childhood socialization is willful blindness.
    I do not think our current problems with family are moral ones, or that they are somehow unique to our country.  I think many of our mistaken perceptions of parenting and the family stem from economic considerations, selfishness, and greed encouraged by our consumer economy.  Earning money and accumulating wealth are not in and of themselves negative, but they become detrimental when they are your sole pursuit at the expense of family and parenthood.  
    In our consumer culture, both men and women alike make the choice of things over people, whether it be not wanting to give up the freedom to go to bars every night, to working later and later hours at the office.  Responsibility at home takes a back seat to your 2009 Ford Explorer and plasma screen TV.
    This creates a climate in which pregnancy is considered the worst thing that can happen to a woman, men shamelessly run away from their responsibility as fathers, and parenthood in general is looked down on as a burden or a thing of the past.
    The family is the core unit of society, not just for Christians, but for human beings everywhere. We have to be conscious of the role it plays in transmitting values as well as genetic characteristics. In that way the family represents a delicate balance between nature and nurture. It should be valued by all members of society as the primary structure of our society.   When the family fails, the individual fails, and when the individual fails, the family fails as well.
 
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    In a recent political cartoon for the Detroit Free Press entitled “Traveling Across America,” artist Mike Thompson juxtaposed two women: a pioneer from 1857 and a businesswoman from 2007.  The pioneer declares, “the trip is grueling and filled with hardship.”  The businesswoman replies, “I hear ya!  My flight was packed and 20 minutes late!”
    In 1905, Art Young was far more critical of his contemporaries when he illustrated a cartoon for Life magazine entitled “World of Creepers.”  It depicts a sea of men in sport coats crawling along the ground under a dark cloud.  The word “fear” hovers just above the horizon.
    These two political cartoons express concern that we are (or were) becoming a culture of complainers, snivelers, and grovelers; mere shadows of our immigrant and frontier ancestors who attempted to prosper despite enduring constant hardships.
    Regardless of the individual veracity of comparisons between our contemporaries and the pioneers, cemeteries and mortuary records bear witness to the austerity of frontier life.  Death at the hands of disease, accident, and homicide were very real and ever-present, if a settler even lived past the age of five.  The fact that these individuals and families often prospered without helmets, Paxil, or inversion therapy probably seems unbelievable to a hypersensitive people who run to their lawyers whenever someone calls them a bad name.
    Hara Estroff Marano, in his essay “A Nation of Wimps” printed by Psychology Today (Nov/Dec 2004), argues that not only are we becoming increasingly incapable of coping with even the simplest traumas, such as scoring lower than a ‘B’ on a test, but that the pampering of our children is the main culprit behind that trend.  “Parents themselves have created many of the stresses and anxieties children are suffering from,” he argues, “without giving them tools to manage them.”  By preventing exposure to danger or challenge and then demanding more and more out of them, we are raising children who are anxious, depressed, and unable to deal with life.
    The answer to our low tolerance for pain and misfortune is simple.  Any long distance runner will tell you that you cannot run 8 miles without first being accustomed to 6.  You cannot run 6 miles without first being accustomed to 4, and so on.  Likewise, we simply cannot handle the harshest challenges of life, either mentally or physically, if we are coddled and prevented from becoming accustomed to the small challenges.
    In a harsh world we can either become tolerant by not shying away from pain and disappointment, or we can shelter ourselves and be unable to cope when those challenges rear their ugly head.  Friedrich Nietzsche recognized which was the genuine hazard: “for us life is more dangerous,” he lamented, “we are made of glass--woe unto us if we merely bump ourselves!  And all is lost if we fall!”

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    Although use of illegal drugs among teens has declined slightly over the past several years, mostly due to aggressive anti-drug campaigns and law enforcement, no one would deny that Illinois has an alarming problem with drug and substance abuse.  According to the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy, the number of incarcerated drug offenders in our state has increased 2,748 percent since 1983.  
    In addition to the incalculable damage done to individuals, families, and communities, Illinois taxpayers spend over $260 million to incarcerate drug offenders every year.  More alarming than that, “Illinois ranks second only to California in the number of individuals incarcerated for drug offenses,” the Illinois Consortium revealed in their Intersecting Voices study of 2006.
    Nationwide, twice as much money ($12.6 vs. $6.1 billion) is spent on drug law enforcement than on education and prevention programs.  While throwing money at a problem is rarely the solution, these numbers reflect the general attitude our society takes towards the problem of drug and substance abuse.  It is a responsive, rather than a proactive, system.
    In order to find a proactive solution to the drug and substance abuse problem in Illinois, we have to understand the roots of the problem and change our culture to reduce the desire for drugs.  Why do people use drugs?  Boredom, social pressures, addiction, and lack of parental guidance (or even parental consent) may all be contributing factors.  
    Using the law of parsimony, more popularly known as Occam’s razor, we can shave off the complex and often theoretically laden jargon used by social scientists to explain increasing drug use in America today.  “Drugs” are chemical substances that alter the normal, functioning state of an organism.  A human being intentionally ingests drugs because he or she seeks to alter his or her normal, functioning state.  Simply put, he or she wishes to “feel differently.”  Most people who are happy or content do not want to feel differently.  Therefore, people take drugs because they are not happy or content.
    Case in point: the lifetime, nonmedical use of pain relievers among persons aged 12 or older in the United States has risen in recent years to over 31 million people, or around 12 percent of that age-specific population.  Individuals who use pain relievers either are or perceive themselves to be in chronic pain.  Likewise, individuals use drugs because they are unsatisfied, depressed, or disappointed with their situation in life.
    When I was growing up, my parents set a good example by both never partaking of illegal drugs or abusing legal ones, and also by taking an active interest in my well being.  Whenever I was upset or felt depressed, my father took me jogging, fishing, or to the race track.  He spent time with me.  Although I suffered from a lot of emotional problems stemming from my school life, the thought of turning to illegal drugs or alcohol to relieve my problems never even occurred to me.
    My experiences have led me to believe that the best prevention is not drug education, and it is certainly not scare tactics or incarceration; it begins in the home and in the community.  Children must have a tight network of friends and family who support them.  Recovering drug users must not be ostracized from the community, but incorporated into the community.  Above all, public events, games, and celebrations must be held frequently.  Give your neighbors reasons to believe that there are other people who look out for their welfare, and that they are not just drones crammed into schools or dead end jobs.
    The danger of drug enforcement rather than drug prevention is that the arms of the community are being rapidly replaced by the arms of the state prison system, the new home for nearly 13,000 Illinois residents convicted of drug related offenses.  Prison sentences for drug offenses not only break up families and isolate individuals from the community, but the stigma of a criminal conviction can only lead to emotional hopelessness and isolation, which are strong motivations for further drug use.
    If we continue our current course, the drug problem in Illinois will not go away in the perceivable future.  We can either continue to bandage it, hide it through incarceration, or we can plant the seeds of a healthier family and community life that will hopefully reduce the root causes of drug and substance abuse.  No one is going to solve this problem for us.  The choice is ours and ours alone.

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    National borders define the territorial limits of sovereign nations, and those nations have the right to secure and control their borders.  Every nation, state, tribe, and kingdom since the dawn of time has demarcated territory and boundaries and reserved the right to defend them from other tribes or nations.
    Yet some in the United States feel that right no longer exists, and that protecting our territorial integrity is fundamentally unconscionable.  These same people chastised both Yugoslavia and Macedonia for justly resisting secessionist claims by ethnic Albanians who sought to carve out their own autonomous zones and attach them to their Albanian motherland throughout the late 1990s.  Similar forms of irredentism and separatism have been two of the primary challenges to national sovereignty in the past few decades.
    Although dozens of comparable examples can be found all around the world, the Balkan mess is a good forewarning for what is increasingly likely to happen in the southwestern United States, where millions of Mexican immigrants have colonized large areas they consider to be theirs by right, even though they lost those lands during the 1840s.  
    Many in the United States have turned a blind eye to this situation, even when the border town of El Cenizo, Texas declared Spanish its official language in 1999, or when the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Mario Obledo, claimed, “California is going to be a Mexican state… if people don’t like it, they should leave.”
    And what reason should this new immigrant population, much larger than any in the past history of immigration to the US, located adjacent to their country of origin, and with historic grievances against the United States, have for assimilation or even consideration of United States sovereignty, when these actions and words go uncontested?
    In that context, a blanket amnesty for the millions of illegal Mexican immigrants in the US would only encourage this behavior in those, like Mr. Obledo, who would use it to further their divisive political agenda.
    We are without question failing in our duty to protect our sovereignty, which includes the absolute right to say who can come across our border and for how long.  Setting a firm and resolute immigration policy to prevent the disintegration of large areas of our territory is not ‘nativist’ and it is not racist.  It is our right as a country to exert supreme political and lawful authority over the territory under our control. 

    Christmas is in the air--at least in the bowels of our national retailers.  As I perused the museum of popular culture (Wal-mart) recently, I discovered that as of October 20th Halloween items were on clearance and store associates were erecting artificial Christmas trees.  Thanksgiving seems to have gotten lost in the transition.
    As I gazed at the product display, I wondered at what point Christmas became less about eating a ham with your family near the warmth of a crackling fire and more about trampling someone for a $30 DVD player.
    Bill O’Reilly speaks of a “war on Christmas” as if the commercialization of the holiday is a recent phenomenon.  The “war on Christmas” has been going on ever since someone decided to link the idea of American progress and happiness with orgiastic spending and greed.  But it is not an atheistic conspiracy to wipe Jesus from the culture that is behind this phenomenon?it is the breakdown of tradition and the crumbling of the gemeinschaft; a deeply rooted, organic sense of community.
    In our technocratic age, when social alienation has become an art form and everything is available at the swipe of a plastic card, the satisfaction of the desire for possessions overcomes the desire for a sense of social acceptance or the strengthening of familial ties.
    In many areas of the country the celebration of holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas have moved from public spaces into places where merchandise is bought and where merchandise is consumed.  On Halloween, for example, I see more decorations inside of stores than outside of houses.  Parents today drive their children from house to house, walk them to the door and then bring them home to feast on their rewards.  Gone are the days when large groups wandered the neighborhood, collectively engaged in the holiday.
    Likewise, Santa Claus is more often identified with a trip to the mall than a parade or a surprise visit at home.  Surrounded by piles of toys and glittering lights, he lures the children in so that their parents will buy?buy?buy.
    It goes without saying that certain aspects of these holidays will always be about consumption.  It would be difficult (and not very fun) to celebrate them without any of the accoutrements, but to make profit the sum total of the holiday is a travesty.
    All holidays, everywhere, are fundamentally about forging and solidifying social bonds.  They are about shared traditions and cultural experience.  They give the community a common identity.
    But these fundamentals are endangered when holidays become just one more means to an end:  $$.

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    In December of 1981, Britney J. Spears came into this world in the deep southern state of Mississippi to working class professional parents.  In what seemed like a realization of the American dream, she appeared on Star Search in 1992 when she was only 11 years old and later joined the New Mickey Mouse Club with future boyfriend Justin Timberlake and fellow diva Christina Aguilera.  Jive Records picked up her demo tape when she was 16 and only a year later, she was singing “hit me baby one more time” dressed in a suggestively redesigned Catholic schoolgirl uniform in the halls of the same high school where the classic American movie Grease was filmed.  
    After selling 76 million albums around the world, staring in her own feature film, and gracing the cover of hundreds of magazines, her career collapsed at the ripe old age of 23.  A few months ago I sat and stared in bewilderment from behind my computer screen as Spears, two marriages and two children later, opened her legs to the paparazzi while giving them the ‘thumbs up’ during a night on the town with Paris Hilton.
    Then it occurred to me that the rise and fall of Britney Spears revealed the fundamental problems with American consumerism, from her contradictory roots as a Christian conservative, to her bubblegum sexuality, all the way down to the implosion of her personal life.  The pursuit of profit and the reduction of all value to performance in the marketplace has characterized our lives since the late 1950s, but my generation was the first to be baptized in the total submersion of this culture.  
    Corporations now cultivate entertainers from a very early age to be marketed to the public, who are harvested for their financial resources like a forest is clearcutted to grind and slice into raw materials.  Britney Spears was not a human being to Walt Disney and her producer Max Martin, she was a product to be marketed, sold, and subjected to planned obsolescence so that she expired when Jive Records found a newer, fresher product to sell to the masses.
    The Britney Spears culture transforms art into a commodity and makes human happiness reducible to the consumption of merchandise.  Britney Spears’ music, like all popular art characteristic of this culture, appeals to the lowest common denominator for maximum marketability.  But there are no redeeming qualities in this process.  As revealed by Spears’ tragic personal life, our consumer culture is destructive of human social relations, as the marketplace takes all precedence over every aspect of our lives.
    Britney Spears unwittingly represents the very worst of American culture, but in the end, as her song says, “I’m a Slave 4 U.”

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“The less government interferes with private pursuits the better for the general prosperity.”
   —Martin Van Buren

     The problem that I see with many “reform” movements in the United States today is that they are, for lack of a better phrase, all talk and no action.  Their members are content to simply complain about a situation and then sit around and wait for someone to come and save them, usually politicians.
    Let me say this clearly and directly: if you are waiting for someone else to do the work for you then you will be waiting for quite some time.  In order to achieve any meaningful results, we must do the work ourselves.
    Multinational corporations have run roughshod over Middle America; ruining town after town, building sprawl and paving over forests, fields, and farmland while you have been glued to the TV watching American Idol.
    I am not asking you to hold signs, commit to boycotts, or write letters – none of which work any-more – but I am asking you to put your time and money where your mouth is.  If you want to see more local businesses stay open, spend your money at them.  Start a local business.  Yes, you – the retired man or woman with plenty of cash on hand and nothing to spend it on.  Why not use that money to open a business and live the American dream?
    The solution to our economic problems is not more government interference and regulation; it is less interference and more enforcement.  Local and state governments spend your tax money to subsidize their corporate friends, while turning a blind eye to corporate improprieties.  Meanwhile, they ignore the struggling, independently owned American business.
    If the playing field were leveled, national retailers such as Wal-Mart, which rely on government funds to subsidize their growth, low prices, and low wages, would be unable to compete with local businesses.  When a Wal-Mart wants to build a new parking lot, the city often pays the bill.  How many times has the city offered to pay for a new lot for your business?  These improvements – new lots, new roads in some cases – all cost money, money that the city hardly ever recoups.  That was money that came out of your pocket.
    Wal-Mart can afford to operate at a profit loss at locations all across America – you can’t.
    So get off the couch and do something.
    Overall, these columns are geared toward convincing you to take more responsibility for your own life and the life of the community around you.  Political parties and interest groups, though they have their place, only serve to divide us.  We cannot afford to be divided over these issues.  The future depends on it.
    Have a stiff upper lip.  Tighten your belt and get to work.  Only the time-tested spirit of hard work and self-denial will save our communities from disaster.