Long and Winding

The United States is walking down the road to the future.  While many leaders have the vision to see the ending, I'll let them argue what end will come, few have the sight to see what the next step is.  In the Christmas classic movie, 'Santa Claus is Coming to Town,' the Winter Warlock sings a song about putting one foot in front of the other.  We as a nation must do that now.

We must start developing our own skills and marketing them.  If you're good at sewing, make your own shirts and sell them to your neighbors.  You'll get extra income and they'll get cheaper shirts than they would at the store.  If you're good with computers, tell your friends you'll do technical repairs so that they don't have to spend the money on a new machine.  Yes this hurts big business.  Yes this hurts the economy.  Big businesses are getting government money and are being run badly.  The economy is too big for its own britches.  Big businesses need to fail and the economy needs to shrink to a maintainable level.  It's going to hurt, but if each of us work hard to make ends meet they will meet.  That's called free market.

We must all recognize that other people are not always at fault for their problems.  If a friend lost their job, invite him over to dinner.  If a coworker can't afford his car payments, offer him a ride.  If someone you have never met says he lost his job, give him five bucks to shovel your driveway.  That's called generosity.

Those are the left foot and right foot that each of us must use to tread forward while our leaders look forward.  They can afford to look at how he economy will function in two years or four years or ten years.  We can't.  We have to live day to day and month to month.

I have a lot of material saved about how the economy should change and how the government should change, but I think we've all heard enough of stimulus and foreign policy.  I heard of a woman at my church who turned 50 this year.  She told her friends not to get her lavish gifts or plan a wild party, she asked them to instead plan 50 acts of kindness.  By the time her birthday came around, 57 acts had been completed.  This is what makes America strong.  We must all come together as a nation and work together.  There's a reason that this nation didn't survive as a confederacy in the first 4 years after the end of the war of independence.  Bickering and blame plagued the first confederacies and the Second Continental Congress were able to see what we need to see now.  There's only one way this nation of states can survive:

United.