Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Cheap Hurts

Imagine you have four children. You would of course, want to give them the best of everything. But suppose you couldn't afford to give all four of them the very best of everything.

Would you shower two of them with the the very best food; the best bedrooms complete with top of the line furnishings; the latest most expensive clothes and gadgets and toys and let the other two have scraps of food, sleep in the garage, and wear rags? Well, of course you wouldn't. No sane person would.

But some people in our country don't have enough to eat. Some wait in line for basic health care at free clinics when they are lucky enough to get in. Some don't have warm coats in the winter.

So much for the Family of Man. We teach our children to share toys with their friends and then somewhere along the line we forget. Or maybe we remember to share, but we continue to elect people who only hear that we want to pay less in taxes.

Well, that will work, too. We can pay less in taxes. But if we do, we'd better step up to the plate and fill it with good food. We'd better be willing to organize fair health care and housing and education and roads and water and bridges and. . . . .

I guess we'd have to set up a committee or something to organize it all. Let everybody have a say in who is going to be on the committee, and stuff like that. We could all just put in our fair share and. . oh, wait. . . don't we already have something like that? It just sounds so much better when we don't call it tax I guess.

But we can't keep going on as if someone else will pick up the tab. We've come to behave as if tax is a bad word. I think we need to stop allowing our elected representatives to act as if all we care about is having a lower tax. Show me someone who can cut waste and take care of the community and I'll vote for her!

5 comments:

  1. Hey Fay,

    I totally agree with you. As a Christian, I don't think it's very Jesus - like to allow other people to suffer. It makes me sick when I see reports of people waiting two or three days in a stadium to recieve free medicial care. Really, I saw a report on these doctors that go around the country to help people without medicial care! I mean it's good what they're doing, but more people should do it. And you know what they should call it? Universal Health Care! People are so afarid of government run stuff, but you know I have a disablity! Anyway, because of this I recieve Medicaid and Medicare. And you know what else? All my doctor visits are paid for and for brand name prescriptions I pay three dollars and thirty cents and for generics I pay a dollar and ten cents! I get sometimes better care than my parents who are on private insurance. And yes, let's share our food!

    Thanks for the good post,
    Amanda

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  2. There might be a lot more money around for domestic problems if we weren't spending hundreds of billions of dollars for fighting "wars"—nine years in Aghanistan, eight in Iraq, with Pakistan or Iran up next. I'm finding the Democrats to be just as useless as the Republicans—talk big and do nothing.

    (So the "A" still doesn't work.)

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  3. WE are NOT "to big to fail." We want government to provide services, but don't assume the responsibilities of government "by the people." I don't believe our founding fathers ever envisioned mass apathy as a possibility.

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  4. Whew! That's a scary true and a frequent obessive thought of mine, Corticowhat. We are not too big to fail. In fact, we may be too big to succeed.

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  5. Well said. Apathy, corruption (personal as well as collectively) It really has so many of us bound up. (me included) May we have the wisdom to work through it and produce some good fruit!

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