OPEN FORUM: Opposition Is Good For The Soul

Well, I’ve done it now. I’ve upset a few of our local folks. In my recent piece entitled “It’s At The End Of Your Sleeve” (Open Forum, Mar. 11, 2009), it seems that I’ve crossed some sort of a line. I guess some of our people just don’t want to be more free and less governed.

I haven’t been just jumped onto in a long time. It happened at the store. Right in front of the frozen foods. She just began to dress me down properly.

She believed I had rendered an amount of disrespect to her President. I don’t believe I’ve done that, and here’s why: as an American citizen, I need to be respectful of the office of the “President” whether I enjoy the person sitting in the oval office or whether I don’t. I believe I’ve done that. Look! I even capitalized the word “President”.

It’s just that, as a young impressionable child, one day, my mother drilled into my porous little head, that it is ill advised at the least and disastrous at the most to sign any document if I have not read it and understood it. I had come home from school apparently having volunteered for a project, and was unclear as to how I got into that predicament. In real life, I had signed something detrimental.

It was also brought right into my face that with my reading disabilities it sometimes took quite a while for me to do that. So it was further explained that if anyone was in such a hurry to get my name on something, that they couldn’t wait for me to absorb the words off of the page, that it was probably an ill-begotten project that would turn out to be crooked or illegal or immoral or fattening in the end. See? I learned this at home.

What I can’t get past is that our President has access to some of the best advice on the face of the earth, and yet he does not read his material. So? Either unadvised or ill advised. I did not do this to him.

Next problem, according to this nice young lady in the TV dinner aisle, her President’s “stimulus” is going to be like a governmental messiah. It is going to save us all from ourselves. According to her, the freedom of government to rule is more important than the people being ruled. She had no room in her busy schedule to remember back to civics class in school wherein we all learned the Executive Branch of government, of which her President is chief member, is there to EXECUTE the law. No. I don’t mean they’re supposed to kill it by lethal injection. They explain the law and make sure things get done. Those are the Cabinets’ jobs too.

The Latin root for the words “legislature”, (see that’s the Congress) “legislate” and “legal” and “law” is the same little old dead Latin word. Get it? Their job is to make law, and hopefully one day, to read it too. So far, not one has read it. And I’m at a loss as to how this fact is not insanely frightening to all of us.

Perhaps they just don’t want to realize how many of the programs they’ve just signed us up for, are only 21st century versions of some of the things instated by F.D.R. They are things that, in the end, made the Great Depression even greater and more depressed.

Economists and savvy money people are shouting to the rooftops that jumping the cart in front of the horse, as we have just done, was exactly the wrong tack to take. They have been saying these problems would level themselves out in much less time if we did none of these things that we seem in such a hurry to do.

This poor lady couldn’t see that we’re already choking on our entitlements and “gimmees”. In the part of the country that I’m from, we have a saying, “If the shoe don’t fit quit shinin’ it.” See? If you’re not part of the problem you know you’re not. I even invited her to show me any instance wherein throwing more money onto any money problem has ever resulted in a good resolution to the problem. She claims she’ll get back to me on that front.

As an aside, I’m glad, in one way, that she stopped me. Not many people cross me. It took nerve, because she knows me and knows that I already have answers to questions I haven’t even been asked yet. And I really did listen to her. I know she believes I’m going to name her in this piece. Not necessary. I even thanked her for her opinion. I know she probably speaks from the same lobby as four or five others who didn’t have the nerve to oppose me in person. GOOD FOR HER! That’s what makes this country great. Opposition. And that same kind of opposition helps to keep me centered as well as tough and on my toes.