Guest commentary: Traveling the wrong road at full speed

By GLEN SPICER
Things are changing so rapidly in America these days that it seems to be happening overnight. Actually it has been a slow, gradual process over the past seven or eight decades. We only seem to be moving quickly in the wrong direction because after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, he accelerated the process.
We all know of people who were being destroyed by cancer long before they knew it. America is being eaten alive by a Liberal Progressivism and we only notice it when signs of the disease manifest themselves.
When then, Senator Obama promised we were “five days away from fundamentally changing the United States of America,” the crowd cheered as if it were a great thing. When the fundamentals of anything are changed, nothing stays the same. The fundamentals of America, the greatest nation God has blessed the planet with, do not need to be changed. Our foundation as a nation needs to be protected from radical change, not eroded by it.
Today we can see a range of policies that we never imagined we’d face. Success has been demonized, profits have been criticized, the job-creating successful have been villainized and their accomplishments penalized.
The very system that created the wonderful example of what a nation could be is attacked at every turn from the inside. The foundation is crumbling and power-grabbing politicians continue to swing sledgehammers at it daily. Sadly, with the liberal mentality they possess, they do it cheerfully, whistling their way to work  like the seven dwarfs.
President Obama was so dead-set on raising taxes on the richest that he didn’t care that the added revenues would not run the government for more than a week the way he spends money. That didn’t matter. “I won the election” manta playing in his mind meant to him that America gave him a mandate to do whatever he wanted to do and it would approve. Powerful egotism sees  little else.
Obama’s adding a trillion dollars of debt every year he has been in office costs us $50,000 a second in interest alone. Some working people’s salary for a year gone in a single second. Not deterred, he thirsts for more ways to spend  like he has a decade-long tax-free holiday.
More revenue means one thing to the federal government, more money to spend. Not to pay toward the debt, but spend. Our financial problem, as we should have learned by now, is a spending problem, not a revenue problem. We can’t raise enough cash to cover non-stop increases in spending. It’s impossible.
Like the man who knew he was in trouble when his wife ordered a set of house plans that included a three-car garage and a loading dock, America knows there is more spending on the way.
We are headed down the wrong road. The road we choose to travel determines the destination we will eventually arrive at. Common sense says that if we want to go to New Orleans on vacation and we discover after driving four hours that we are heading north instead of south, only stopping and turning around will get us there. Even then we have to work to recover the time we lost. It takes us longer to get where we want to go but the sooner we make the change, the sooner we arrive where we want to be.
Today’s liberal politicians seem to think that stepping on the gas and moving more rapidly in the wrong direction makes up for the mistake of taking the wrong road. It doesn’t.
Congress has been of late the most ineffective Congress in decades but that didn’t stop Obama from giving them a raise. In their minds  they feel like their vain efforts are being rewarded and rewarded behavior is repeated behavior, so expect more of the same.
Our country began with the knowledge that the government was the responsibility of the people. Today, we have surrendered that power and the people have become the responsibility of the government, to control, regulate, oppress and enslave.
Once given power, the powerful rarely relinquish that power. It must be taken from them. Our votes never have been so important and too many lately have been wasted. It is time for a revolution, not a violent one hopefully, but one of accountability, commonsense, honor, integrity and a return to the values that America was built upon.
Unless that happens we will soon be painfully reminded how traveling the wrong road never gets  us where we need to be.
As human beings in control of our destinies, history shows that we forget what made us great and we begin to  penalize instead of honoring those things and people. We seek to destroy the successful contributors, the only  ones who can solve the very problems those in power create. No problem can be solved with the same mentality that created it, but politicians seldom take responsibility for their short-comings and instead double-down on losing bets.
This current administration has nationalized the healthcare industry, the automobile industry, the housing system, the student loan sector with more to follow. More government jobs have been created in the past four years than private ones, the very ones that fund the insatiable, always eating, federal government.
The people who pay the bills, whose industrial enterprise built this nation, are being stripped of their ability to rescue us. That leads only to continued failures and ultimate collapse.
The logic is simple and sound. If private businesses fail to be productive, operate efficiently and profitably, they go under. It  is a matter of life and death and they take it seriously.
When government fails from poor leadership and bad decisions, it just takes more of our money to keep it afloat. It is a losing proposition, as we saw when Obama sent millions of our tax dollars to a dozen “green” energy companies that later folded, flushing the money down the drain.
I still have hope in America, but unless the hands of the individuals who can pull us out of this economic chaos are untied and individuals are encouraged to do what only they do best, without unreasonable regulations and hindrances, all hope will be lost.
We may one day recover from the disastrous state that the inexperienced and misguided President Obama has  led us into. But we still have a greater challenge, that of dealing with the mindset of the millions that put him in power in the first place.
Socialism has never worked anywhere in the world and America will not be an exception. Individual ingenuity built America. The power of the individual, with their dedication, commitment and innovation, will preserve it. That is unless the entitlement “give-me” state becomes the norm and we are coming dangerously close to that.
Glen Spicer, a Union City resident, is a longtime contributor to The Messenger. Published in The Messenger 1.16.13

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