HOW?

Our country is 236 years old, much too long for any organization to sustain viability. So we have a broken system, a system broken into two parts, conveniently labeled, left and right.

The rhetoric from both side is designed to influence the voter who is all foam and no beer. I am a conservative and this may come as a surprise after listening to some on the left, but I do not want to kill children. I do not want to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air (Where in the heck does the left think the right lives, some other planet?) I don’t want the sick to have no place to go and I don’t want the streets full of homeless families and pregnant women. It’s not what we want, WE ALL WANT THE SAME THINGS! It’s in HOW to get what we want that the left and right differ.

It’s the issues that intelligent people should be discussing, not trying to scare the snot out of the uneducated into voting on “our” side. How about discussing solutions? What will best help our country and its people. Is demand side economics or supply side economics best for job creation? What entity is best able to handle health care, public or private sector? Are our poor best served by giving a fish or teaching to fish etc.?

Our two biggest differences are divided into social and economic. Since, it would appear most voters do not understand economics, especially the government’s version of finance, (Can you believe there is actually a debate over whether $17T in debt is a good or a bad thing?). Because of the economic complexities most of our vocal differences seem to reside on the social issues.

I believe every person is made up of an emotional and a rational side. The healthy folks are those who have the appropriate amount of each. I believe our society, being made up of people, is the same; our society comprises both the emotional and rational aspects. Now, I’m about to make a statement that for some unknown reason drives the left nuts, but I’m going to do it anyway. In general, I believe the Liberals represent the emotional side of society, the conservatives, the rational side. Why do I say that?

The 2 legged stool of liberal philosophy is based upon the emotional concepts of fairness and equality. (If you don’t believe this is true listen to how often a Liberal will use those words or allude to social situations that are not fair or equal.) The problem with that is life isn’t fair and equal.  So, since the world and pesky human nature do not create fairness and equality, the left needs something to unnaturally make them happen, enter the government.

 If you want a government big enough to enforce fairness and equality, you have to pay for it. Since the government has no money, it must take it from those who do have it (redistribution just “feels” right) and give it to those who do not, therefore making things fair and equal.

As Conservatives we also believe in fairness and equality. Being more rational, we know it will not happen. If we figure some thing should have more fairness and equality about it, our first thought is not the government. We will look to the private sector, family unit, church, not for profits etc.

Again,  what left and right have in common is we want the same things, we just come at problems from different vantage points. Another thing we have in common is that we will all be disappointed. The Liberals will be disappointed because their Utopian ideas of a peaceful world,  a drastic reduction in poverty, majority and minorities treated equally, will never happen. The Conservatives will be disappointed for the same reason, except they never thought they would happen.

Since we all want the same, but are so divided over the how, we will have to experience something that is very rare in our government. We will have to compromise.  The Liberals will have to compromise by recognizing there is a reality with which they must deal. The conservatives will have to compromise by recognizing the power of working toward a world we would all like to see.

Not an easy stretch for either side.

DO YOU TAKE THIS ……PERSON

Soon we may live in a world where the only people opposed to gay marriage will be gay people who are married.  Craig Fergison

I do not support same sex marriage. The discussions I have had with proponents of SSM have attacked my position as you would attack a homophobic Neanderthal. If we were in the same room we would have had to remove all sharp objects, or I am sure they would have gone for my jugular.  This is not a group you want to mess around with.

Here is my position:   I don’t care what sex or number of  people want to come together in any kind of legal contract. That is certainly their right to pursue “happiness.” You lose me when they want to call that union “marriage.” I believe in the traditional definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.

 If you are for same sex marriage, how would you define it? If the proponents of SSM say marriage is a union of any two people who love each other, then I would have to ask, “Can only two people love each other?” What are the limits, if any, of your definition? Is there any combination/ number of sexes, and /or ages where you would no longer feel comfortable calling it a marriage? Once we vary from the traditional definition of marriage, where, if any, is the limit? We would have to know that polygamists won’t be far behind. How about the cast of Glee? North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)? OK, now we have crossed the line, but we have to admit for each of us, there is a line over which we don’t feel comfortable crossing.

I’m sure this has to do with my age. My wife Jean and I have been married a couple of months short of 50 years. When we were young and dating, marriage meant something special. Marriage meant you found that person (of the opposite sex—anything else was never considered) with whom you wanted to spend the rest of your life. Living together was relatively unheard of, jumping in bed on the second date earned the woman a not to flattering name (the guy, on the other hand, a very flattering name). It was all saved for the institution of marriage. Marriage was what your parents did, and what their parent did, and theirs etc. etc. Marriage was for the sake of children and society as a whole. Children born of a happily married man and woman is as good as it gets. Any other combination is a distant second. Marriage is custom, it is tradition, it is an institution. To me it is something special.

As I said, I don’t care who or how many choose to form a special bond and choose to have that bond “legalized,” but I am totally against usurping the word marriage. That word, and its meaning, is already taken.

Less than 4% of the US population is currently in SS couple relationships. Only 40 % of heterosexual couples believe in marriage anymore, (which is why they don’t care what it means, and why someday SSM will become the law of the land) so we can assume that only 40% of 4% of the same sex population would even want to get married. That’s approximately 1.6% of the population, which I feel is too small of a number to redefine the entire institution and history of marriage.  Also, consider that if SSMs are as successful as heterosexual marriage, 50% of them will be able to experience one of the 1138 benefits of marriage—divorce.

If you love someone cherish, cuddle, stroke, kiss, write songs and poems, dream, and talk about him/her all the time, cry and laugh over/with,  feel lost without him/her,  commit to,  we just shouldn’t get to “marry” him/her.

I firmly believe that in my life time people of the same sex will be able to legally marry. We are a society that if somebody wants to do something, and they make enough stink about it, the majority will concede. Very little today, it seems, is worth the majority  fighting over.

If a same sex couple can have all the legal benefits of marriage, why the insistence on calling their union a marriage?  Is it because it’s a club others are in and they aren’t allowed in?  MENSA is also a “club” that, believe it or not, I can’t join even though my exclusion is unfair because they are discriminating against 98% of the population. I can’t get in because I don’t meet the criteria. If I can’t get in and I want to be in a club of others with my intellect (I’ll leave a space here for you to fill in what you’re thinking), I’ll have to call it something else because MENSA is already taken.  I’ll leave it to somebody in MENSA to come up with an acceptable name for the union of same sex folks.

 Quote from an article written by a gay man:   We should not attempt to force into an old construct something that was never meant for same sex marriage. We should welcome the opportunity to christen a new tradition, beginning a new chapter in the history of Gays and Lesbians within American society.

Amen.

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY

Consider:
If you had spent 30 years building a business which is now worth $10 million, and you feel it’s time to kick back a bit, but you hadn’t done as good a job of succession planning as you should have. Now you have to go outside to hire a CEO.  The first person who comes for an interview is a young, handsome, articulate, black man named Barack Obama. During the interview he tells you he has never run any kind of business, only managed a couple staff people, has never had to operate under a budget, never collected a private sector paycheck and will not give you any references or show you his college grades. How inclined would you be to entrust your business to him?  Yet we gave over the reins to the most powerful country in the world with 313 million “employees” and a budget in the trillions to just such a person.

Why, because our system is such that if you believe in Liberal philosophies and you would like to see those philosophies implemented throughout the land, you have to vote for the Democrat candidate, same with the Conservatives. We only had Romney to vote for. Romney had all the knowledge and experience to financially save this country, but not much personality. Liberals had Obama, Mr. Personality plus, but not the slightest workable plan on how to get us out of the financial mess that Bush’s end of term liberal spending got us in.  I thought the voting public would go with the expertise over the personality, but I was wrong.

This country is sorely in need of a leader, the person who gets things done (but how could we expect that from President Obama when he's never had any leadership experience. We knew that and elected him twice anyway--that's our fault). This last sequester fiasco is a good example of this lack of leadership. Whether he could have personally done anything or not, I’m sure could be up for debate, but his plan seemed to be to get in front of the TV cameras, where he is most comfortable, and has conducted most of his presidency, and scare the snot out of the people about how this 2% reduction in Government spending would reduce the quality of everyone’s (except the politicians’) lives. Then, at tax payers’ expense, he whisks his wife and daughter off to ski in Colorado while he goes on an expensive (not to him) golf vacation, comes home and spends a total of 56 minutes with the leaders of Congress.

Again, could he have actually done more?  Could meeting with the leaders locked in a room with a tub of Jack Daniels and some big, old Cuban cigars (with a couple of cigarillos for Speaker Pelosi) and not coming out until they had reached an agreement, have produced “something?”  I guess we’ll never know, but that complete lack of involvement would be enough to get the Board of Directors of any competent organization, recognizing their mistake, to boot him out on the street, or at least require he attend a Leadership 101 training class at the local community college.

We obviously have no score card for our Presidents. We seem to rely on the intelligence of the electorate (apparently not the best move by the framers).Business has objectives for their custodial staff (how may waste baskets to empty, toilets to clean etc.) but we don’t have them for US Presidents. Then when it comes time to “renew their contract,” what criteria do we use?

We’ve seen what happens when effectiveness meets popularity in the voting booth and it’s not pretty.