Word on the Street – Middle America, not the Middle East

If anybody wants to know why Sheridan is not getting money to fix their water system or why Worth County School has to make hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of budget cuts after already having made a bunch of cuts or why our lettered roads are not in good shape anymore, look at the Middle East.
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When Bill Clinton was President, his mantra was “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” We had eight years of economic growth under his rule. Surpluses were the rule of the day at the end of his term, not deficits.
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But now, it seems that our politicians on both sides of the aisle are obsessed with the Middle East instead of Middle America. And now, our roads are crumbling, our schools are having to make more and more cuts, and our towns are struggling to keep up water systems in the face of burdensome government regulations.
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George Bush had a personal vendetta against Saddam while Dick Cheney had personal interests in occupying Iraq.
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And now Obama is going to continue his drone attacks far into the future even though Bin Laden is dead and we have not been attacked since 9/11.
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The question is, when is enough enough? The more that Obama continues his drone attacks, the more that we plant the seeds for the next 9/11, just like our building of permanent bases in Saudi Arabia planted the seeds for the 9/11 attacks.
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We’re not excusing anybody’s actions. But we’re suggesting that there is a much better way of bankrupting the terrorists than the extrajudicial kidnappings and imprisonments of the Bush Administration or the Obama drone attacks – getting off of foreign oil and getting electric cars, wind farms and solar plants built in every city in the US.
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Actions speak louder than words. Most of us agree that we should have a strong national defense. But when certain politicians cry the blues about our escalating deficits and then turn around and spend trillions of dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan while making plans to cut 90% of federal funding from our schools over the next 10 years, we know that these politicians care more about the Middle East than they do about Middle America.
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And actions can have unintended consequences, no matter how heroic they might seem. The corporate media reports all of the good consequences about the raid that killed Bin Laden, but ignores the bad – such as the fact that Pakistan is running for cover from Polio immunization campaigns after it turned out that a US agent, Dr. Shakil Afridi, set up a phony public health immunization campaign in an effort to get Bin Laden’s DNA.
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Polio, for those of us who didn’t grow up in the 1950’s, was the biggest scare in the US following the fear of nuclear war during those days.
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But we eradicated Polio by making it a national priority. And we can bankrupt the terrorists by doing the same thing with energy.
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None of us have all the answers. Therefore, the best role for government is not to stick their heads in the sand under the guise of “All of the Above” or to dictate to small towns and small businesses and farmers how to run their operations. The best role for the government is to facilitate, providing resources and expertise to towns and cities and help them develop a vision of a country free of dependence on high gas prices and free from the fear of terrorism.