Plan B and A Note About Ban Ki-Unsustainable
While Obamacare has been completing its incubation this past week and emerging as a full-blown, pre-existing condition designed to cripple America, I’ve been in Turkey — making the rounds in Ankara, Istanbul and slightly further afield. This is one of the few countries in the world where I actually enjoy traveling by bus. They serve coffee, tea and snacks enroute, usually with a lot more courtesy and a greater variety of offerings than most long haul flights on American airlines.
As an American I find it’s much more pleasant to become absorbed in Turkish bus trips, or even Turkish politics, than to sit watching, with a sense of helpless horror while Barack Obama triumphantly destroys U.S. medical care — apparently in a gesture of tribute to his deceased mother.
But there are obligations back home. This evening, fortified by an Efes Pilsen, I had to come fully back online to survey the scene. And, not for the first time, it gets tempting to weigh the options. There’s the wonderful old American way, in which you fight for freedom, celebrate it, do whatever you can to protect it; you work hard, take risks, take responsibility for what you choose to do with your life –and glory in the rewards. And then there’s the growing heap of incentives to just try to tune it all out, cash in what you can, and walk away (or run) — and maybe just ride that Turkish bus forever; anything, as long as there is no need to ever again listen to the ruinous nonsense coming out of Washington.
This is fanciful thinking, of course. I’ll be back at work in the morning, and so will most folks who find it unbearable to tune in right now to the news. But it sure is tempting to escape into daydreams these days … though back to our usually scheduled programming with the next post…
.Or sooner … Let’s note in passing that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon just made his second trip to Gaza in 14 months, and managed yet again (someone please correct me if I’m wrong — but I fear I’m not) to parade and pontificate for the cameras without once uttering the word “terrorism.” In Ban’s scheme of the world, it seems, the problem with Gaza is not that it is run by Hamas terrorists, but that any effort to try to block them from killing people is ”unacceptable” and “unsustainable.”
Thank you, Ms. Rosett…
A long-time admirer of your insight and your writing, I might have guessed it would be you who first gave voice to what I suspect is now a widespread feeling: a desire to drop out, get lost, board the first bus to anywhere and just try to escape.
For millions of Americans, daily living now has about it all the fears, frustrations and anxieties I’m sure were present in the Great Depression. And for many millions more not actually living on the edge in their personal lives, there is the panicky feeling that generally we are headed towards that same cliff.
How many share a sense that things are starting to spin out of control? I don’t believe that question is asked in any polls, but I think that currently about two-thirds avow America is headed in the wrong direction.
The corrective? It sounds so simplistic, and by god far easier said than done, but our only hope is to get back to first principles; i.e., the Constitution.
And as a first step, yes, we must vote out all incumbents, in 2010, 2012, 2014, until all current office holders are swept aside, all corrupting practices swept out with them, and until we have a governing class truly devoted and responsive to that class of Americans who make the whole thing work, or try to. Will some good men and women be swept aside unfairly? Of course. But the sacrifice of their careers will be a small price to pay for the purging that is long, long overdue. And besides, the Founders never intended for politics to become a career. Hail, Cinncinatus!
Thanks again. You didn’t offer much to alleviate my near-despondency, but it’s good to know I’m not alone, and that you’ll be back on the job in a day or two.
And no doubt within a month or two Obama and his minions will provide another reason for persons of a Constitutional frame of mind to, however wearily, once again suck it up, once again pick up the (non-violent) weapons at our command, and once again take to the barricades. I’ll be there. Not hardly for myself, and not so much for my forty year old son and his wife, but for my two young grandsons.
Thanks.