By Larry Oscar
Life is a journey of learning, or at least it should be. Sometimes I wonder if people realize that we were created to learn, and we should never stop learning. We have the largest brain for our size of any species on the planet. It’s a shame that some folks just don’t use it. As you get older it’s even more important that you exercise your brain just as much as you should exercise your body. Failure to do so results in a slower mental function and more rapid 
deterioration of your faculties. That goes for other things too…. but I digress.
New technology has helped a lot of us improve our lives, but it requires us to learn and use our brains even more. We all could use more education. Education is the key out of poverty. It is the source of innovation and economic prosperity. It is also the fuel that keeps your life fire glowing. Without it we can become a walking vegetable, our life gets boring, and we will shrink into a society of Eric Blair’s (George Orwell) vision of 1984.
Blair was a committed socialist. Ironically his novels educated us, at least for those people who took the time to read them, on the evils that socialism brings. We are a species that continually asks questions and challenges the status quo. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing. For by doing so we learn what works and what doesn’t. In the sixties we challenged darn near everything including the length of a persons hair. As a result, we found out what matters, and what doesn’t. Hair length doesn’t. Unprotected sex does.
Recently we have all witnessed the good and the bad of so called “change.” The recent Tea Parties our tax paying citizens are attending reminds me of the sixties protests. I was at some of those protests. They were a great place to meet chicks!Those protests were supporting individual liberties and an ever expanding freedom from slavery. They brought about new civil rights legislation aimed at insuring that all of us enjoy freedom. Not just a certain group, but all of us.
Today our nation is “changing” back to an era when slavery was considered a normal part of the society. Our leaders are creating a “slavery class” out of taxpayers. Think about it. What’s the difference in being forced to work for the sole benefit of plantation owners under forced involuntary servitude, and in being forced to work for six months out of every year for the sole purpose of the government under forced involuntary tax servitude. No difference, in fact, for those fifty percent of us that are forced to work to pay income taxes so a special few, forty eight percent of us who don’t pay income taxes, can feed off of the producers in our society.
There is no difference at all. What kind of “change” is it that simply rotates the tires. If you have a car with four bald tires, what good does it do to rotate them? Today we hear all of the talking heads spout out, “The polls show that the American people want……..”. We need true leadership in our nation and we are not getting it today. Not from either party. To tell the American people that “The peopleknow they must live within their means”, and then in the next breath to say to them, “We must pass this $787 billion dollar stimulus bill….”, funded by borrowing, is the ultimate in hypocrisy. That’s not the change that was voted for. It’s not what the American people “want” that our leaders should be focusing on. It’s what the American people “need” that they should be focusing on. What the American people “need” is to be forced to live within their means. That refers to individuals, local governments, state governments, and the federal government as well. The American people “need” to be educated and we must never stop getting educated.
We “need” to learn from the lessons history has given us. We “need” to put our “needs” in front of our “wants”. “Wants” are an emotion, but “Needs” are the requirements of life. We have been living in a false economy. When seventy percent of our economy is consumer spending, and those consumers are in an all time high credit card and mortgage debt, then our economy has been funded by false wealth. You can’t borrow a million dollars and then call yourself a millionaire. We have been called “The richest nation on Earth”. How can we be the richest when we have more debt than any other nation in the world?
The truth is we are a nation of undereducated debtors who don’t want to pay the bills for the lifestyles we have been living. If you’re going to give a dance, you have to pay the band. Enough said. I’m running out of space and time, and to top that off I “NEED” more scotch and another cigar. Rats!I ’m out of both…….Oh well, I’ll do what seems to be the “new patriotic thing”, and go mooch them from my neighbor.