As I stated before, I have been wanting to begin blogging before, but it seems that everyone and their mother and their friends and their cousins and their girlfriends and so on and so forth blogs, and everyone has ideas that their blogs will become the "most watched and most viewed" blogs in the world and then they will propel themselves to fame. Now don't mistake me, I guess that would be rather neat, but this isn't my end-goal. I'm simply just adding my opinion to the list of millions already floating out in internet-land, the only difference is, I'm in a position to make a difference locally.
So to start (and please remember, I am an extremist (which is not synonymous with "supremacist"), what is the main problem with the state of affairs for our country today? Well, this is a discussion that could, and has, lasted for centuries. There are factions who say that the problems are with Christians, Muslims, churches, Jews, big corporations, little corporations, drugs and narcotics, governments, police, pornography, welfare, media, antipathy, money, lack of money and on and on and on. But, if you will indulge me, I'd like to lead you down another rabbit hole.
Americans desperately want to be unified. We are, by the way, Americans living in THE United States of America. Or are we?
America was not intentionally built to be a unified group of provinces singularly feeding money, arms, people and goods to a "Greater Good" or centralized government. Originally, the thirteen British American colonies banded together, however reluctantly initially, for a goal of removing all-encompassing authority residing in Great Britain. The colonies, which all wanted autonomous independence instead of interdependence or strict dependence, slowly voted to come together and fight the English, whom they saw as not only intruding upon their livelihoods, but curbing any idea of independent individualism. And so with that, I'd like to remind people of the fact that we were not bred by our founding fathers of infant America to be "Americans." We were individuals of the states, or, more simply, citizens of the state in which we lived in. With this notion, all power was relegated to the states. The individual states had the rights to levy taxes, develop commerce, raise and train militia (early American state armies) and trade with each other. The central government had really few purposes - to engage in treaties and deals abroad, provide for the common defense of the entire area encompassed within the borders of the states and to help regulate interstate commerce. At no point in the Declaration of Independence was the idea that the burgeoning federalized government located in the eight cities before Washington, D.C. was to regulate marriage, alcohol, firearms, mattresses, door frames, modes of transportation, all money and all taxes and all prices of things, jobs, food, medicines and on and on and on. The plain and simple fact of the matter is - the United States has become too large, too fat, too gluttonous to maintain its current stance.
So exactly, what do we do? Do we continue to vote every one to four years for people who chant that they'll "Clean up Washington" because they refer to themselves as "outsiders?" Well, in a Utopian world, I'd say, "Yes!" But as we know all too well, once someone gets elected to the House of Representatives, the Senate or to the Presidency it is the same old song. They start pooling in money, they become popular (if not a celebrity in their own rights), they become powerful. Then they forget their original purpose while continuing to grow exponentially larger in the cerebrum. Money begins to take over their lives as they stop listening to constituents and begin focusing on what group they can fall into like perverted little peons in a warped and disgusting high school for the rich and moronic. They decide that instead of doing what their electors wanted and what would be best for the area in which they represent, they decide to jump on the bandwagon of doing what's best for the nation or the world. All the while, they continue to climb up and up that ladder of globalism until they reach the point in which they forget where they came from, who they represent and why. Many of these individuals never started their own little companies or businesses or were a citizens of or ran little towns which had very fixed budgets due to very fixes taxes and sources of revenues. They see the nation as a big game of SimCity - meaning when the money runs out, you enter in a cheat code (in these terms, a never ending budget which gets pushed off every year) until someone somewhere who has a tad bit of authority such as in the Congressional Budget Office says, "Umm, I'm sorry sirs and madams, but we are way out of money and sadly, you passed rules stating you can't use any more cheat codes (extended budgets)." So then, everyone looks at each other and says, "Damn, the rules! More money for Egypt, more money for entitlements, more money for Brazil, more money for China, more money for us!" And what do we do? We average citizens of the States sit back and talk quietly amongst ourselves, where we won't necessarily not be heard by those whom may might offend or for fear of getting into trouble.
So, let me tie this in to my initial ramblings and how this ties into the individualism of states. Where I live, where I grew up and where most of my fore-bearers are from are areas within the country in which you wake up every day, go to school, graduate, go to college and then work or go straight into the workforce. You don't take two years off to "find yourself" by slumming around and doing every narcotic you can afford or by "inventing yourself" by drowning yourself in alcohol with money you got by selling plasma or with money from mommy and daddy. You learn and you work, you learn and you work. Working is not always fun. I have a fantastic job and love it dearly, but do I love it every day? No, no one does. Are there days I wish I could just have $50,000 deposited into my checking account so I could sleep in all day and then play XBox all night? Yeah, sure, but that isn't the responsible way a reasonable adult lives. So what exactly makes us different here in the Midwest South and Inland Empire as opposed to a majority living in, say, California, Oregon, Washington State and over in New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut? Is it because we were born of some super-stock by people superior to those on the West and East Coasts? Nope. Will you find lazy, welfare entrenched people who believe "Entitlements are my Right" instead of, "Man, I could really use some help, I'm swamped," here in the Midwest? Yep. Will you find decent and hardworking individuals on the coasts? Of course! But why is it that we seem to have such sharp divisions in which larger amounts of intrepid independent individualists (IIIs) congregate here in the middle, south and western areas than they do more generally on the coasts? I don't entirely know. I can tell you from my experience though that when I was growing up and as I stated in my last post that while I was growing up, I was given great amounts of freedom to explore, play and learn as a child. I was not heavily regulated, but I was taught and rebuked by parents who had full fear and faith in our Lord God. And as a new and good friend of mine told me last week, many kids of my generation grew up with parents who wanted to life to be better for us than it was for them. Now while that is all good and well and we should aspire to lead our children into better lives that we lived, did we really lead such awful lives? I just turned 30 this year and I can tell you, absolutely not. My life growing up was fantastic. It was not poor, sad, meaningless and brutal. I grew up in an era of prosperity. There was no war or internal strife or civil unrest. We always had enough food, toys, clothes and places to play. If I wanted a new toy or object, I usually got it. If I was hungry, I was fed promptly and fully. I cannot and will not say that I grew up in a time and place in which my children had "better have it better than I did."
Ok, so I can try to tie this all together and be done with this rant, try to imagine my whole purpose for this discussion. If the majority rules by majority voices and the majority currently resides in the coastal regions on both sides of the country, but the aforementioned majority is currently trapped and ensconced in an American Idol mindset of "I'm entitled," why should the rest of us be forced to have to feed these peoples in their addictions to entitlements? This goes back to my first comments about the state of our infant country circa 1778. We were not citizens of The United States of America. We were/are citizens of These United States of America. People in agricultural North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia did not have to feed the people having a hard time working in more industrialized areas of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. They helped their own people. So when did this change? Next, we'll look at the rights of the States as they should have been plotted out from the beginning of our history to today and what happens when your benevolent government becomes evil and "destructive beyond its own means."
And so it begins....
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