By Dr. John Gilmore
What do you do when the government begins to hate their opposition so much they begin to black mail them by holding the citizens hostage? This is something that has been happening regularly nowadays with the GOP and the debt ceiling. I find it amazing that such a thing would ever happen in the United States. Some people say that this comes as a result of the type of greed that destroyed the Athenian Empire and the Roman Empire. Both of those empires were powerful. They fell because of the corruption inside, not because of outside forces.
We find our system beginning to get
more corrupt as tons of money is being poured in by large
international corporations with no real allegiance to the United
States or any other country, just to themselves. The question is
“What do we do about it?” Cutting the food stamp program doesn’t
seem to help. Union busting, which ultimately lowers everyone’s
wages and causes less money to go back into the economy doesn’t seem
to be helping. Fighting about abortion and marriage equality doesn’t
seem to help. What do we do during these trying times?
I think we need to create jobs with a
living wage. The idea of Green Energy Jobs was a good one. Building
wind turbines and solar panels is working for Germany. They have
reduced their dependency on Nuclear Power-plants in less than two
years by converting to 1/3 solar energy, just by giving the citizens
incentives to put solar panels on their homes and then feeding the
energy back into the grid. Only 1/3 of their energy needs are
petroleum based, while the other 1/3 is bio-diesel. These are the
types of policies we need, instead of grid lock. On top of it all,
they have had national healthcare for years and are one of the
strongest economies in the world.
I think it is time for our government
to stop playing politics, stop trying to turn one religion against
the other, one race against the other, one gender against the other,
the old against the young…to create any type of division they can
so they can become more progressive and really govern in line with
the ideals put forward by Abraham Lincoln when he spoke of this
country of the people, by the people, and for the people. Instead we
have a country for 1% of the people and division among others.
Officials are being paid to make decisions based on the health and
welfare of the highest bidders. It is time to unite and work to
rebuild this American Dream for all of the people and stop the
divisiveness. I hope that U.S. Citizens can do this, or there just
may not be a country that is worth having very soon. .