As our 2016 presidential election process begins in earnest with candidate after candidate announcing his or her entry into the game, I find myself disconnected from so many of my fellow citizens. While friends, family members, acquaintances and radio and television political pundits are spending their time praising or belittling each of the hopeful candidates, I look around and wonder when our conversation will begin to focus on America’s many current and future challenges in an effort to develop solutions to our problems.
America has a significant financial gap between the wealthy and the middle class and poor of our nation. Would it help us, as a nation, to return to our way of governing during the 1940s through the 1960s when this gap was narrowed and those of us on the lower economic scale found themselves so much better off?
Studies would appear to indicate that health care programs in many of our allied democratic nations are faring better for their citizens as a whole than our healthcare program is doing when it comes to infant mortality and life expectancy for adults. Should we be focusing more of our attention on this issue?
America’s infrastructure of too many roads and bridges is said to be crumbling. Too many of our local public educational systems are losing the ability they had decades ago to propel our students into a successful adulthood. Our prison systems continue to grow exponentially, and not to the benefit of our nation, and we continue, as a nation, to experience too many violent attacks against our citizens, especially through the use of guns, in almost every state of our union.
And while all of the above is happening to us as a nation, and despite the lessons we have learned from our attempts in the past to change the world through our use of our great military strength in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we continue to have a significant number of Americans insisting that, rather than spend our resources on our own national internal problems, and in spite of our many failures at trying to recreate other nations in our image, we should try again, this time in Iran, to make them a better place. Better, they say, to live by the sword, than by example.
As one who grew up in the 1940s and saw first hand how our nation came together as a community to fight a war that was thrown upon us as a result of an attack on our Pearl Harbor by our enemy, I know that we have the strength to take care of and defend ourselves. As one who saw, during the 1940s and 1950s, my America working together not only to defeat a military enemy, but then, under the great former General and then President Eisenhower, to rebuild our needy infrastructure as a result of all of us, the rich, the poor and the middle classes, sharing as best as they could in this enterprise, I believe we can successfully address these same existing problems today.
I know our political candidates, for the most part, want us to focus on name calling against their adversaries. I want us to focus on our needs and I want us to elect leaders that will actually try and resolve our challenges.
America has a significant financial gap between the wealthy and the middle class and poor of our nation. Would it help us, as a nation, to return to our way of governing during the 1940s through the 1960s when this gap was narrowed and those of us on the lower economic scale found themselves so much better off?
Studies would appear to indicate that health care programs in many of our allied democratic nations are faring better for their citizens as a whole than our healthcare program is doing when it comes to infant mortality and life expectancy for adults. Should we be focusing more of our attention on this issue?
America’s infrastructure of too many roads and bridges is said to be crumbling. Too many of our local public educational systems are losing the ability they had decades ago to propel our students into a successful adulthood. Our prison systems continue to grow exponentially, and not to the benefit of our nation, and we continue, as a nation, to experience too many violent attacks against our citizens, especially through the use of guns, in almost every state of our union.
And while all of the above is happening to us as a nation, and despite the lessons we have learned from our attempts in the past to change the world through our use of our great military strength in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we continue to have a significant number of Americans insisting that, rather than spend our resources on our own national internal problems, and in spite of our many failures at trying to recreate other nations in our image, we should try again, this time in Iran, to make them a better place. Better, they say, to live by the sword, than by example.
As one who grew up in the 1940s and saw first hand how our nation came together as a community to fight a war that was thrown upon us as a result of an attack on our Pearl Harbor by our enemy, I know that we have the strength to take care of and defend ourselves. As one who saw, during the 1940s and 1950s, my America working together not only to defeat a military enemy, but then, under the great former General and then President Eisenhower, to rebuild our needy infrastructure as a result of all of us, the rich, the poor and the middle classes, sharing as best as they could in this enterprise, I believe we can successfully address these same existing problems today.
I know our political candidates, for the most part, want us to focus on name calling against their adversaries. I want us to focus on our needs and I want us to elect leaders that will actually try and resolve our challenges.
RSS Feed
