Posts Tagged “self reliance”
By Larry Oscar
As we get things going toward the next big election, things couldn’t heat up more for some Americans. It’s time that we took note of all we have seen in the past eight years and what our country needs to do to get our economy and American values back on track.
The recent situations in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD should make every American sit up and take note. Both of these situations have resulted in the release of years of frustration by the citizens of these communities and many other communities throughout this country. As a city councilman in Baltimore put it, “The violence is wrong, but it is a reflection of the lack of educational and economic opportunity for the people who live in this community.” Very well put.
And just who caused the educational and economic opportunity to leave the community, and many more just like them throughout the entire country? Well let’s take a look at both the education issue and the job opportunity issue. For starters, the education system in this country has been going downhill since the late 1960’s. To be exact it was 1968 when the federal government and the big teacher unions took over. This is when the central planning liberals in Washington D.C. started telling us what we could do to discipline and teach our children in the individual states.
Big Government, Unions Have Ruined Education
And this is when the big teacher unions decided the union membership handouts were more important than the children’s education. So why should people in the cities like Baltimore be surprised? After all, my bet is almost 90% or more of the people who live there voted for the very politicians who supported Washington D.C. central planning and the big teacher unions. The irony is it was one of their favorite sons, Franklin Roosevelt, who warned them about government worker big unions. They didn’t listen did they?
How to Improve the Economy
Now let’s take a look a jobs. It’s actually very simple. If you want tomatoes what do you have to do? Obviously you have to grow healthy tomato plants. If you grow poorly watered or cared for tomato plants you will get very few and very small tomatoes. To get large juicy tomatoes you must grow healthy robust tomato plants. It’s the same for jobs. If you want good paying jobs you must grow strong and healthy businesses. And you must have a variety of healthy small businesses, as well as healthy large businesses.
For several years now our government has been making it harder and harder for small businesses to survive, and even giving large global businesses a financial incentive to leave the country. We have the highest corporate tax in the world. The current liberal philosophy toward business is that the large corporations are “evil,” and if you have a small business you didn’t create it.
Stop Blaming Others
To quote the Clown-in-Chief, “Someone else made that happen.”
My father was a simple man. He went to night school and studied drafting. He spent over 40 years at his craft, and he was an exceptional draftsman. Dad never once complained about what he got paid. He was always there to help me and his values were conservative. He taught me that almost 100% of the time my problems in life were looking back at me in the mirror every morning. Dad wouldn’t let me blame others.
You know what? He was right. Americans of all races, cultures, economic status, and faiths must accept the fact that they alone have voted for and got what we deserve. If we treat businesses like ATM machines, and continue to let our educational system decline, like it has been for the past 50 years, then we can’t expect our great country and the promise of the opportunity it used to hold, to continue. We are killing the goose who has been laying the golden eggs.
Envy of those who are successful must stop. It’s time for all Americans to look into the mirror. Don’t expect a superman in Washington to come and save the day. Our problems are of our own creation. We need pro business leadership. We need to honor and value the businesses of our nation and the people who built them with their own hands. We need to acknowledge and encourage individual achievement.
Free Handouts vs. Self Reliance
Instead of giving handouts and creating a government dependant class, we need to teach self reliance and standing on your own two feet. Our country should be a place where it is the easiest place in the world to start a business. We should not be a nation of regulation roadblocks to success.
Hey people. If you think economic opportunity is bad in Ferguson and Baltimore, you should have been in the former Soviet Union. Remember….your vote matters. Vote for someone who is pro business, and let’s gets some decent job growth.
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.
Sometimes you just can’t help but marvel at the complete lack of common sense in our society. For many years it was believed by many that during the cold war the former Soviet Union had developed a new type of virus that would spread undetectable throughout a population. And the only effect it would have would be to progressively make the society dumber and dumber. I used to call it the “Russian Dumb-Ass Disease”. It just seems that we have more and more stupid people in our country that just can’t connect the dots.
If you want to enjoy your life and be happy it takes some extra thought. Life cannot be put into sound bites. You must be able to have some level of deductive reasoning in your thought process. My observation is that we have more and people who rely on their emotional feelings to make decisions in their life, and less and less people who set their emotions aside and actually think about rational solutions to their life’s problems. Maybe it’s a reflection of a society that lets the elected leaders do their thinking for them, or maybe it’s because they just don’t want to take the time to sit down and contemplate their problems. Perhaps it’s because it is easier to let the government feed you, cloth you, and tell you what to think.
After all, it’s much easier to be lazy than to be responsible. But for whatever reason, it’s taking a toll on our country and ultimately on the entire world. Your problems in life are mainly caused by you and not by others. When we allow our leaders and educators to teach our children to blame others for their problems, we are turning on a ticking time bomb in our society that may someday go off with tragic results. Our school shootings are carried out by students who are taught to blame their parents, teachers, and other students for their problems. And not themselves.
Failure of leadership in any society will result in untold human misery for that society. The list of the failed empires throughout history is very long indeed. And all have a large amount of death and destruction in the wake of their demise. The chapter of world history that includes the United States has yet to be completed, but I fear the final chapters are beginning to be written.
Our country was founded by people who had a pioneering spirit of self reliance and steadfast resolve to be responsible for themselves and their families. This country has definitely drifted away from that pioneer spirit. Today’s leaders tell us that “You didn’t do that, someone else made that happen.” After all, it’s not your fault you dropped out of school, got involved with gangs, drugs, and ran afoul of the law. It’s someone else’s fault. Sadly, there will never be any hope for those who believe this tripe. The reason is you cannot change other people’s behavior, only yours.
Hope and change cannot happen in your life until you understand that YOU are the only one who can make it happen. That’s right. Not big government, elected leaders, teachers, parents, or anybody else can change your life as easily as you can change it yourself. I overheard a conversation between two ladies recently and couldn’t help but make a note. One lady was telling the other that “Nobody likes me”. She never stopped to think about what she just said. Obviously the other lady liked her, or she would not be sitting there listening to this B.S. If you want people to like you the solution is simple. Be more likable.
People like likable people. Approach life with a smile, and others will smile back. Lets’ do a quick thought experiment. Say you are walking down the street and a dog crosses your path. If the dog is wagging it’s tail and happy to see you, you respond positively. On the other hand, if the dog is growling, not wagging it’s tail, and has hair raised on it’s back, you respond negatively. You respond to people the same way. It’s not the responsibility of others to like you. It’s your responsibility to be likeable. It’s not the color of your skin, the money in your pocket, the cloths you wear, or the car you drive that makes you “likable”. It’s your attitude about life and the smile you bring to others lives.
If people feel better when they are around you, then you will be liked by almost everybody. There will always be those who are jealous and envious, so choose your friends wisely.
And above all don’t take life too serious. The only real serious thing in life would be running out of beer or scotch. Now that would be serious! (I could be wrong about the money though….it always seems to attract women!)
In the brief history of our nation we have experienced a few crossroads, and we are at one of them today. Many of us have abandoned the principals that made this country the most powerful and prosperous nation the world has ever seen.
Moving forward we can either continue to abandon our founding principals, and therefore continue a downhill path of economic destruction, or we can reclaim the values that allowed us to rise to the top. We are beomg bombarded with political rhetoric from all sides. We will be faced with the choice of who will lead us, and in what direction we want to be led. For each American that will mean we must examine our core values and determine if our own self interest is more important than saving the country.
And we must evaluate if it is even worth the effort. Over the past several years this column has pointed out the problems in our society and how we have lost our core values. We have let our educational system fail us, and we now have a very low and poorly educated workforce who cannot compete in a global economy.
We have not been responsible for our diet and exercise. The result is over one third of all Americans are obese, and this has increased our health care costs. We have let ourselves become envious and we now covet the success of others, and we have turned the American dream of wealth and prosperity into something “evil.”
We have lost the uniquely American value of self-reliance, and replaced it with a nanny state of social dependence. We have fallen into the trap of letting the rest of the world demand that we solve their problems rather than demanding that they stand on their own two feet.
We have failed to live within our means, and now debt is crushing our economy. The list goes on and on. Now we are indeed at a crossroads. Do we reverse course, or do we continue an inevitable slide into a third world “has been” nation?
These issues must be considered when we choose our next leader. Let’s assume that we want to return to prosperity, and to the values that brought us to a point of greatness. What should we look for in our next President?
For starters, we need a leader who can bring back and inspire American individualism to stand on your own two feet as a person, not a dependant on society. Individualism is the trait of character that instills self-reliance and personal responsibility. That will insure that Americans stay in school, work hard, and get a good education.
We need a leader that emphasizes solutions to problems rather than wallows in empathy and self pity. Empathy has never solved a single problem in anyone’s life, but solutions to problems have. And we need a leader that praises success, and encourages individuals to seek wealth and happiness. The fact is wealthy people contribute to our nation’s financial stability while poor people are an economic and social burden on the nation.
We need a leader that understands that living within your means is not “radical,” “extreme,” or a “Draconian” idea. We need a leader that can have the self discipline to let the rest of the world grow and sort out their own problems rather than getting involved in their business.
Other countries must learn to stand on their own two feet as we have. A good case in point is China. In the 1940’s China had a revolution and they purged their country of foreign influence. They went through some very bad times. They killed and murdered their own people. They suffered famine and hardship. And they had a very difficult time establishing their identity as a nation, but they have been evolving over the past 60-plus years from a communist nation to a capitalist nation.
Karl Marx had it backwards. And if China continues their path toward capitalism, they will overtake our economy within the next five to 10 years. No system is perfect. All systems of government will have people who won’t make it. The question is what system provides the best prosperity for the most people. And that solution for government is obvious. It is capitalism.
China has learned that, and they will continue their evolution towards capitalist prosperity. Solutions for our problems and the future of our success will not come easy. Nothing in life worth having ever comes easy. That is why welfare and handouts never improve people’s lives. They only prolong the inevitable.
We should not look for the easy way out. Let each of us examine our own values and look in the mirror. If this country is worth saving, then we must choose wisely. If not, then maybe we should have a plan “B” and be ready to leave the country. After all, most of our ancestors immigrated here to escape some nation that was heading downhill. They did it, and if need be, we can do it. — Larry Oscar
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.