our failure in rebuilding the country shows in our failure to rebuild the World Trade Center

I was just driving home from the store and on the radio was a montage of different broadcasts from September 11th, 2001. I was not prepared for my reaction...we have already had 7 anniversaries of the day...why should today be different than the last ones. I couldn't be more wrong.

As I listened to the newscasters, disk jockeys, cell phone calls, I felt the tears well up in my eyes. Fortunately, I was in some pretty heavy traffic, because I actually had tears rolling down my cheeks for almost the whole montage. I remembered what it was like on that day as the news started coming in.

I remember this vividly because I was feeling pretty sorry for myself on that day. I was out of work at the time, but was picking up odd jobs here and there. On the night of my birthday, I had to work an overnight shift replacing RAM in computers at a call center. As I was doing this, I realized that just the year before, I was the one that was hiring people like me to come in and replace RAM in our computers. I was extremely overqualified for the job I was doing and I was miserable. It was my birthday, and I had to work all night at this miserable job for miserably low pay. I was not in a good mood and was feeling pretty down because of my situation.

I got home at about 7am, and started helping get kids up and ready for school. I couldn't take it any more so I went to bed leaving Gusti to deal with it. I had only been asleep for a short time when a friend called me and told me I needed to turn on the television. I told Gusti to do it and kinda went back to sleep. It didn't last long. I spent the rest of the day in a stupor...I was exhausted, but I couldn't quit watching the screen. I went to the internet, watched the news, waiting for any new information. I, like many others in the world, was shocked. Not that I thought it could ever happen, but that it finally had and now our world was going to change.

I remember how everyone pulled together...I remember the vows to rebuild the city, to make sure the terrorists knew that their act was in vain and that now they had made a big mistake. Similar to the attacks on Pearl Harbor, this act had awakened the sleeping giant. We were united, we were resolved.

I sit here today wondering where that has gone. To me, the first sign that this was not going to be a lasting change was when the bickering started over what to place at the grave of the Twin Towers. The politics started again, the divisiveness started again, the apathy and cynicism started again. I know, because I was one of those who participated in those feelings. I realized that everything was going back to normal and started not caring or paying attention to what the politicians were doing because I just didn't want to hear it any more. I became more partisan as the attacks grew more partisan. I wondered aloud if anyone at the national level of politics could even be called a moral person any more. I was right where they wanted me.

Fast forward to today. It has been eight years...and I see a symbol of our country and the state of affairs we are in while looking towards what used to be the World Trade Center. Eight years and the spot is still empty. Eight years and people don't seem to care any more what we do about it. Eight years and we are more divided than we have ever been in recent memory. Wow, time flies when you're apathetic.

Politicians...are you listening? Want to unite this country? Want to put the positive energy of millions of people to work building back the American spirit? Want to show that you are more than just a power hungry slimeball who doesn't really care about he country or the Constitution? Rebuild the towers.

We need a symbol in this nation. We need something to look to that reminds us of where we came from, who we are, and what direction we need to be moving. We don't have that right now. We have symbols of individuals and parties, but those don't matter. Rather than focusing on one person's achievements (or potential achievements), let us remember what our country stands for. We are a melting pot, that means that when you become an American, you become an American. We are not Irish Americans, we are not African Americans, we are not Catholic or Jewish Americans. In my mind, those things don't exist. We are Americans, that is enough for me. As a country we need to join with those around us who are different, who have strange ways. We invite you to bring us your positive customs, leave the negative ones, and join with us as one. You want to achieve that? Then quit politicizing things that matter, quit pitting us against our neighbors, quit the destructive behavior that you have fostered for so long.

We need a symbol, and this is the one that I see when I think of unity in our country...

 

And here is another one...

 

Somebody create me an image like the bottom one, including the top one, and an image of what the new buildings are going to look like.  Post it everywhere, put it up in Post Offices, show it on the evening news...

The failure to rebuild the World Trade Center is a sign of our lack of resolve and unity.  Someone in power needs to stand up and call it like it is and do something about it.  The time is now, we need that symbol.

I find myself agreeing with the darndest people...

If you haven't noticed, an underlying theme of my posts has been the lack of willingness by us to discuss issues in a rational way. I believe that the politicians of this country have been successful in one main thing over the last century...

Want to know what it is? I could go on and on about the failings of the political elite in the United States, about the corruption, the waste, the power plays and the outright corruption (oh wait, I already said that one...). I could go on about those things, but I will not. I am going to focus on the positive today. What is this one success that has trumped all else? What great thing have the politicians of America done that has been so successful?

They have succeeded in turning us against our friends and neighbors. They have succeeded at convincing us that Republicans want to take away your right to an abortion. They have succeeded at convincing us that Democrats want to take away our right to bear arms. The have succeeded at polarizing the nation to the point that a part of our identity is now our political party. When you identify yourself as a Democrat or Republican, a whole slew of generalizations are instantly attached to you. How convenient it is to have a ready definition of all my beliefs that someone else plugs into their database as soon as I disclose my political leanings.

I'll tell you right now...I am what is called in Utah, Undeclared. I was a member of the Republican party for many years. I felt the beliefs of the party most closely resembled my beliefs, and I had to choose. That is part of our identity, you can't be neither. A few years ago, things started changing for me. I started noticing the way politicians were successfully dividing us in order to stay in power. I noticed that when your party is in the minority, they promise to change everything about the way things run in Washington...no more corruption, we will work with the other party when WE are in power, etc. I then noticed that once that party was successful in obtaining the majority, it didn't take long for them to imitate all the worst behaviors of the previous party. Could this really be happening over and over again and we as citizens never notice? I couldn't believe it, yet there it was, right before my eyes. I researched, I read books, looked on the internet, talked to others. This pattern has been going on for many decades. Politicians in certain areas always promising the same thing, yet 30 years later, they are still in power and have not done anything to fix the problems that they promised to fix 30 years ago.

I have wondered for a while now if there was even the possibility that we can ever agree on anything for more than a day. After the attacks of September 11th, we seemed to put away the partisan bickering for a while. We were all Americans, we had been attacked, all of us. Not just the thousands in NY or the Pentagon or in a field in Pennsylvania, we as Americans had been attacked. We rallied together in a way that we had not done for 60 years. I wondered at that...why is it that in order for us to pull together and remember that we are Americans before we are Democrats or Republicans we have to feel threatened externally? Why is it that the only thing that seems to unite us is war? Why can't we realize what is happening and start uniting our country without these external forces pushing us to do it?

I fear that we have not learned our lesson in the past, so we will not learn our lesson this time. I fear that the country has been irreparably harmed and divided. The politicians have succeeded in polarizing this country in a way that our external enemies only wish they could have done.

Then, I read this article. I don't usually agree with Pat Buchanan. He is not somebody I have looked to as someone who wishes to unite us. But on this topic, I find myself agreeing with him...read it and then come back...

Well, I tried to link to this story, but it didn't work...here is the article:

Is America coming apart?
Posted: September 10, 2009
7:53 pm Eastern
Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.wnd.com

© 2009

Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.

At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?

Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother -- and then do assignments on his sermon.

The liberal commentariat raged about right-wing paranoia.

Yet Byron York of the Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America's school kids, the left lost it.

"The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," railed the Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office
to investigate.

Obama's actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to "Just say no!" to drugs.

Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.

We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health-care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats.

We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.

We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.

One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.

Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.

Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.

One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.

But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.

We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.

Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.

Now it is death panels, global warming
, "birthers" and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?

The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.

"E pluribus unum" – out of many, one - was the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

Is America, too, breaking up?

I end tonight with the final words from this article...

"E pluribus unum" – out of many, one - was the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

Is America, too, breaking up?

I fear it is...I fear we as Americans don't have the courage or strength any more to make this article something that we look at in 20 years and think..."wow, I can't believe we ever thought this was a possibility". I hope I am wrong. I know that for my part, I am going to try very hard to invalidate the claims in this article.

I hope that many of you will join me in becoming Americans again, not just Republicans or Democrats.

Will I ever get to Healthcare?

OK, something I need to clarify...

In reading a lot of my own stuff, I realize that there might be a tendency by some to see a callousness in my viewpoint. I think I need to explain that I am generally a shy person with regards to what I do for others...I don't like to toot my own horn. This may lead some to the feeling that I care only for myself and let all others be damned. This couldn't be further from the truth. Let me explain this once and then hopefully I can be done with it.

I believe that we have a moral obligation to help those around us. I don't believe it is the governments role to take that obligation and follow through with it. I believe that the reason our country has been so strong in the past is because we cared about our neighbors...not in a "your lawn isn't nice enough" or "your daughter was out late last night" type of way, but in a way that we genuinely care for their welfare. If our neighbors need help, we help them. When natural disasters hit, when financial disasters hit, when personal tragedy is at our doorstep, we as neighbors are there for support. That is what forges the ties of community together, that is what makes us strong. Not because we all go to the same church or believe the same things (we don't), but because we are all human beings and there is an incredibly strong bond there that is difficult to break.

I volunteer my time to many people and many causes. My skills happen to be in the area of computers mostly, so that is what I help others with. I have a brother-in-law who is a doctor. When he is here visiting, he asks me to help him with computer stuff and we ask him about medical stuff. That is how it works. So, most of my "community service" comes in the realm of computers. That may not seem significant to most of you, but for someone whose hard drive just failed and there are ten years of family pictures on it, I can guarantee that they are grateful for the help.

In addition to computer help, I can swing a hammer or push a broom. I spent a few hours last night helping on a house that our community is rebuilding for a family who recently found out their son has muscular distrophy. Their house was not adequate for the new needs they had, so the community is pulling together and making changes to the house so that as his disease progresses, they will be able to deal with his physical limitations. Last night I was there with about twenty others who had voluntarily taken time to help. The leader of the project is a very successful home builder who has taken an amazing amount of his time to make sure this project is successful. He has spent time and money that most of us never could in this endeavor. I have been there multiple times helping out with my limited skills. We all benefit from the work that we do there.

I believe that what makes us a strong community and nation is not that we all believe the same things as far as religion or politics go, but that we all believe in the idea that we are a family. We help because we want to. Are there those that don't or won't help others around them? Absolutely. Do I wish they would assist? Absolutely. Am I going to make a law to force them to help? Absolutely not. I would hope that they would see the benefit to all of us (including ourselves) and then act appropriately. The only people that I will force to help others are my children. They don't have a choice. When I say we are going to help someone, they do it (or suffer the consequences). Do I have to force them very often? Not really. They have had experiences in helping others that have made them want to do it again. It is a positive experience that enlarges our soul and our circle of influence. Those commercials that talk about how one kind action can cause a chain reaction that goes on and on are true (sometimes a little corny, but true nonetheless).

I give to local food banks, I participate with my scouts in collecting (and in donating myself) food for those in need. I never throw anything away that could be used by someone else...it is always put in a pile that is then given to a thrift store so that others can get the benefit of it. I turn off the lights when I leave a room, I have replaced most of my light bulbs with compact florescent bulbs (of course now I realize they are more toxic than incandescent ones, now I have to change to LED). I make sure the tire pressure in my vehicles is correct, I drive in a way that maximizes my fuel economy. I wear my seatbelt. I am actively pursuing a solar option for my house, I already tried a windmill and the city won't let me put one up. I have two garbage cans in my kitchen, one for trash, the other for recycle. Do I need to go on?

I think I am very typical of many out there. We are not who the politicians like to say we are...right wing nutjobs, left wing wacko's. We are practical people who want to live our lives in a way that is pleasing to us. If that also is pleasing to God or community or nation then that is even better. I cannot force you to be a patriot. I cannot force you to be a moral person. I cannot force you to believe the way I do. I can only show you through my actions that the things I believe are beneficial and if you want that...great. If you don't want that, I am fine with your decision.

All right, I'm not sure how much sense this makes, but it is on my mind right now. I'll just have to come back and look at it in a few hours to see if it makes sense to me. Time to get back to work...

Obama healthcare brings this blog back from the dead

OK, if Obama's healthcare plan can bring this blog back from the dead, maybe it can do something positive for this country...Well, that is a little far fetched.

My life has been so busy over the last year that I decided that this blog (which had barely started) was an unnecessary distraction that I needed to let go. Over the past few months, something has been growing and growing inside me though, and I now have to follow my gut. So, without further ado, I am re-entering the blogosphere and voicing my concerns and triumphs, my pain and sorrow, my happiness and joy (hopefully there will be lots of that, but I sincerely doubt it).

Healthcare...

Against my better judgement, I listened to the speech given tonight by President Obama on healthcare. An interesting thing happened to me as I listened...I grew more and more frustrated and realized that I cannot keep my mouth shut any longer. There was a particular line in there that really irked me and got me thinking...

"We are the only democracy, the only advanced democracy on Earth, the only wealthy nation that allows such hardship for millions of its people."

First of all, we are not a democracy, we are a republic. There is a big difference, but that is not what I want to focus on right now. When I heard this line, I immediately thought about the uniqueness of our country. We are different from everyone else...we allow people to fail. We allow people to make decisions and then pay the price or gain from those decisions. That is why the United States has made the incredible strides in quality of life and science and business and everything else. We allow people to succeed.

Well, maybe I should say that, in the past we have allowed anyone to succeed or fail as they chose. I don't believe we are that same country now that caused the cry of liberty to be heard around the world so many years ago. We have become great because of our freedom to become great. With that freedom to become great also comes the freedom to fail. That is a hard lesson for most of us. I have experienced both the failure and the success of my choices. I left a very good job with excellent benefits to join a startup company that I strongly believed in. Six months after joining them, we ran out of money. For the next year and a half I worked many long days trying to get a product out the door that I thought would change the world. For over a year and a half, I was either not paid or paid a tiny fraction of what my salary was supposed to be. By the time that product was ready for market, we had no money to let anyone know. Through management decisions and a market climate that was hostile to our idea, we eventually failed. My life savings was gone...my 401k was down to $152...we had nothing left except our house (which we were able to save). The only job I could find was as a temp working in a job I had done 7 years earlier. It was a job I hated with a passion. I had quit that job twice when I was doing it before. I took the job...I felt a responsibility to take care of myself and my family. From that job came another job...at about 30% less salary that I had been making the year earlier. I took it. I worked my way up in that job, I went to another one. It took me 6 years to get back to the salary I had left when I went to the startup...but I did it. It was not easy...but I did it. I did it with the support of my family and my wife, my church and my friends. I am successful not because of the skills I possess, but because of the work I do continually to gain those skills.

OK, that was a really big sidebar to what I really meant to talk about, but it shows you what I believe in the core of me, that the Constitution of the United States of America gives me the freedom to achieve whatever I want to achieve...if I work hard enough. But, I said earlier that I'm not so sure that this is the country I am currently living in...here is an article that supports that opinion...

Swiss topple U.S. as most competitive economy

Because of the policies of this nation for the last 12 years at least (yes, I include George W. Bush in this) and the what had been a slow march to socialism until recently, I believe the U.S. has lost much of it's competitive edge. I still believe very strongly that even though many of our freedoms have been taken away (both directly and indirectly through legislation and judicial decision and our general laziness) we still live in the greatest country on this earth. People from all over the world want to come to the United States for the opportunity it provides. I don't know how long that can last though. The reason we have been so successful over the years is because we have generally been free to pursue our goals and dreams. I am afraid this will soon be over.

Obama lamented that we are the only country in the world that could allow suffering like this to happen...I see that not as a mark of shame, but a badge of pride. With potential for greatness comes potential for failure. Those of us who are successful should absolutely help those who are having difficulties, but if you want to see more about my feelings on that, look at my earlier post on my belief on giving.

Wow, maybe my daughter is right...I could never be a teacher because my class would never get out on time. I never even made it to healthcare. I will pick up on that tomorrow. If I don't stop now, this post will have to be put into chapters...

goodnight.