What is the solution to America’s economic problem? How will we resolve the foreign policies debacles of the last eight years? How will insure that graduates of our schools, both pre-college and college, can meet the challenges of the coming years?

The answers to these questions, whether you want to hear them or not, will require money. And because of what has transpired over the past eight years, with almost unlimited spending for what has become a never-ending war on terrorism and an equally blind eye to greed and theft in the public market place, it is going to be a lot of money. The only problem is that most of the solutions that will be offered will be solutions that have no vision for the future and will in effect serve as a momentary fix instead of a permanent solution.

Just as the Preacher wrote in Ecclesiastes that there was a time for everything, this is the time of potholes in the roads where we live. The solution will be to patch the potholes and hopefully smooth them over enough that you cannot tell where they are as you drive on the roads. But winter comes and the ground freezes and the roads move with the freeze and thaw cycles, the potholes and the roads become separated and when the plows come by, out come the patches. The next plow then tears out more of the road and the pothole grows bigger and bigger. As long as the policy is to patch the potholes, the road will never get repaired. The only solution is to shut down the road, strip the layers and layers of asphalt from the road and repave the road. But no one wants that done. It will cost too much and it will be too much of an inconvenience for those who must use the road. So, the solution will be to continue patching the patches and perhaps one day in the future figure out how to create a material that will adjust with the continuing changes in weather.

But one day in the future, the road will be in such bad shape that it will have to be fixed. The only problem is that we are unwilling to see into the future. We seemingly no longer have the capability of seeing into the future; our children are not taught how to think and our solutions are always in terms of what we have now and the problems that we face now. We forget that problems will not be solved until tomorrow and today’s materials and methodologies were only good yesterday.

Do we need to fight against terrorism? Yes, but we need to work to solve the problems that create terrorism, not simply spend money in such a way that creates a never-ending war. When I was a high school student slogging through the history of Europe, I had a difficult time with the length of the wars that ravaged the continent. How could you participate in a Hundred-Years War or the Forty-Years War? It seems to me that our belief in military power has created a 21^st century equivalent to the epochal wars of the past. And while we may bring our troops home from Iraq, we still have troops in Afghanistan and apparently plan on sending more. And if we are not fighting in the Middle East, we are part and parcel of the fighting in the Gaza Strip. I am reminded of the first words of “Wooden Ships” by Crosby, Stills, and Kastner,

Stills: If you smile at me, I will understand
‘Cause that is something everybody everywhere does
in the same language.

Crosby: I can see by your coat, my friend,
you’re from the other side,
There’s just one thing I got to know,
Can you tell me please, who won?

Stills: Say, can I have some of your purple berries?

Crosby: Yes, I’ve been eating them for six or seven weeks now,
haven’t got sick once.

Stills: Probably keep us both alive.

Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy,
Easy, you know the way it’s supposed to be,
Silver people on the shoreline, let us be,
Talkin’ ’bout very free and easy…
Horror grips us as we watch you die,
All we can do is echo your anguished cries,
Stare as all human feelings die,
We are leaving - you don’t need us.

Go, take your sister then, by the hand,
lead her away from this foreign land,
Far away, where we might laugh again,
We are leaving - you don’t need us.

And it’s a fair wind, blowin’ warm,
Out of the south over my shoulder,
Guess I’ll set a course and go…

Why are we not spending our time, effort, and money to combat hunger and illness? What would happen if we were to focus on removing the causes of terrorism instead of just using violence when we know that the only response will be more violence?

We live too much in the present and we are worried more about keeping what little we have even when we know that there are so many who have nothing. We hoard what we have while we know that the number of people who have nothing continues to grow each day.

It is one thing to say that we are going to rebuild this country, that we are going to rebuild our schools, and we are going to fix the problems of society. But when the next words that are spoken, and these words come from both sides of the political aisle, are words of criticism and negative reaction, change will not come. In fact, it seems that the only change that many people want these days is the transfer of power from others to themselves.

We have become a society quick to criticize any solution that is not instantaneous and which benefits the individual first. And because power lies with those who have, the only acceptable solutions are ones which benefit those who have and ignore those who have nothing. And we are not willing to pay anything approaching our fair share. The very thought of increased taxes is anathema to everyone; the mantra of expenditure is almost universally “let someone else pay for it.”

True change only comes when everyone involved accepts the idea that change is necessary. Those men who meet in Philadelphia more than two hundred years ago sought to resolve the problems of government created by the Articles of Confederation. But they also understood that simply rewriting the rules would not solve the problems of the country. Only a radical and new approach would work and that is why we have a Constitution today.

I am not calling for a radical revision of American government. We quite honestly do not have the same sense of purpose in this country that marked those first days of this country. What I am calling for is a radical revision of our thinking process; if we do not begin to think of tomorrow more than we think of today, we are not going to have a country to worry about, we are not going to have a world to worry about, and we are not even going to have a tomorrow.

We need change, real change, and not just more of the same.

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Cross-posted to Thoughts From The Heart On The Left

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 6:55 am and is filed under War, Economy, Environment, Healthcare, Taxes, Constitution, Government, Ethics, Welfare, Freedom, Democracy, Education, Foreign Policy, Culture, Political Philosophy, Peacemaking, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.