I have been promising this entry for awhile now, but have found myself getting hung up on many other things in the interest of catching up on my other writing and getting my other pages back up and running. With this entry I want to take a moment to go a different route than most post election thoughts have gone, which is a Trump bashing party. I did not support Trump, in fact I signed a petition to get the Electoral College to side with the popular vote, that was me doing my part. Even so I want to steer clear of bashing our next president, because, for starters, there is more than enough of that going around so I would not be covering anything new, and also there are things that I feel “We the People” have been over looking for a really long time in the interest of putting all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak.
I predict, that within the first 90 days of Donald Trumps presidency, a lot of the people who voted for him and most of the ones who did not, are going to be trashing his term, and I say this, because guess what? The same thing happened to Obama. The same thing happened to GW Bush. Now while all elected officials make mistakes, there is something to be said of UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS, when it comes to these people that we vote into office. Only one percent of Americans can afford the type of lifestyle where you are not generally having to devote so much of your time and life just trying to make ends meet, because of this I think we have this issue of WANTING to think that these people are like shiny golden gods and maybe, just maybe they are going to get in there and fix things from the top of Mt. Olympus on down……. Problem is much of what ails this country is not anything that CAN BE FIXED by some long winded list of government made rules, It is things that the government, in reality can’t nor should be expected to handle. We are a democracy and what that means is, where we see our government fail, is where WE THE PEOPLE need to take up the slack.
The free thinking people who came up with the concept of democracy many millennia ago, did so with the working knowledge that putting the needs of the many into the hands of a few is a fools errand. An example of the meaning of this would be one of the big gripes people have had about the Obama Administration and that is Obamacare. Healthcare reform. Sounds good doesn’t it? Sounds necessary doesn’t it? One of the strong points made to justify it, was to ensure that everyone could have affordable Healthcare, and we got government funded insurance on the idea that it could force the private insurance companies into lowering their premiums. Sounds good in theory, untill you realize that the greed of the private insurance companies, is in part caused by the greed of other sectors of healthcare that Obamacare did not even address. One of these is the unethical practice of doing unnecessary tests and treatments, just because the doctor knows they can get the money for it. Obamacare got hit with that, but what we don’t think about is that the private insurance companies have always been hit with that as well. I’m sure that uncalled for back surgery that the insurance company got hit up for, for over eight grand works wonders for keeping those premiums down…..Not so much. Then you have what we call BIG PHARMA and the fact that when one of these companies make a patent on a new drug, no one else can make a knock off for two whole years, meaning in the beginning they can put whatever price tag they want on their product and if there is no substitute the patient has to pay that 800 USD for seven little pills in a bottle. What you did not see Obamacare do is try to regulate that by having a government based drug company. So in the end most of what makes healthcare cost an arm and a leg was left untouched. Is that all the fault of Obamacare? No, it is isn’t, because the reality is, in order for government to enact healthcare reform and be perfect, you would be looking at a book of laws and programs, that written in legal terminology, would be roughly seven times the size of the Holy Bible and if you were lucky about an eighth of it could even be understood, and if you were divinely fortunate one sixteenth of it would actually get enforced to any degree of efficiency once it made it’s way down the levels of healthcare. Our problems, CAN NOT be fixed from the top, down. From 1998 until 2000, one of my three jobs that I held at the time was as a janitor for a private owned doctors office. On three occasions while emptying the trash in the phlebotomy room I almost got stuck, by used needles that were wrongly placed in the regular waste paper basket rather than in the plastic biohazard container where they belonged. On all three occasions I went off on the doctors who ran the place to do something about it, but alas it happened again. That was NOT on any government agency to do anything about, it was on the doctors who ran that private practice to fix and they failed. See where I am going with this? Before we have the right to expect more from our elected officials who come from American families and American towns, we HAVE to be able to expect better from ourselves, because “We The People of The United States of America” ARE the BOTTOM LINE, WE always have been.
Every election whether it is treated like UFC 200 Main event, like this last one was or not, is ripe with ads where candidates talk about what they believe and other politicians with known faces come on there and talk about how much this person or that person cares for our nation and it’s people and it is all to the inspirational and patriotic orchestra music playing in the back ground. I swear I don’t think I have seen a single profession where more people go out of their way to create larger than life personas to get the support of people than politics….. Oh wait a minute, professional wrestling comes to mind. With this being the case how can the people hope to believe that they can do as much for themselves as these shiny golden gods of Olympus that we feel the need to punch a ticket for once every four years? Well let me challenge you with a little piece of history that took place here in 2016 amid the desperate struggle for presidency. You might have seen me post here about a movement called Rise which was founded in the interest of protecting the rights of rape victims. The movement gained such support from people in general that they created an Act to take to the federal government to get passed into law. Now the fore runner of this group is a 24 year old girl named Amanda Ngyun and from start to finish the Act she took to Washington, with the backing of her supporters, went through each section of government with UNANIMOUS votes and government support. A girl, backed by the people, a girl twelve years too young to even be able to run for President of the United States, by law and without a political title of her own, did more to cut through the same old partisan politics that have been a stopper to many things attempted for the common good of the people than ANY president has been able to do for decades. We have power. Our problem comes from either not knowing how to use that power, or simply not believing that we have it in the first place.
Now before I close this out to the appearance of being just another know it all who specializes in complaining about an issue rather than trying to come up with a way to fix it, I want to revisit a point I made in one of my earlier entries. I talked a lot about my time living on a river bank in the small town of Marmet in West Virginia after my divorce. In that time I met many challenges. No room in shelters. No transportation other than walking because I had to keep every penny I found for things like water especially because this was in June of 2014. When you are placed in this type of situation, you have a choice to make. You can either cave to the despair that every single one of the numerous set backs cause, or you can really take stock of what is creating the issue, why some of these programs do not work, or do not work to the degree needed to really move towards solving homelessness as a problem. In the process of documenting my every move via Facebook I really was able to look at the situation and say. PROBLEM: I don’t have transportation, but I have to go to multiple places, JUST to get an idea of what all is out there that can help me get through this and come back into being a productive member of society, I then have X number of places that need to go to just to get the ball rolling. I have five days a week that any of these places are open to make use of them. THIS IS DOUBLE THE LEG WORK, DOUBLE THE TIME, and being on the streets, is no different than any survival situation where time is of the essence. SOLUTION: An easy fix would be to inform and provide the information to all of these programs to all of these organizations, since they are all essentially there to fix the same problem. What this would allow to happen is for someone of limited transportation to only have to go to one place in order to get informed themselves of all that is out there to aid them and cut down the leg work through giving them the tools to figure out a plan of action rather than go off of trial and error. I bring this up, because I believe that if we collectively had this same type of mentality, we would find that there really is so much more that we can do towards fixing our problems ourselves, instead of relying so heavily on elected officials just to turn around and blame them for EVERYTHING. And truthfully, if you are already feeling the negative effects of something that you are complaining about, then it stands the reason that you are already in that mess and it really will not take anymore of your time to examine it and see exactly where the problem is occurring and have an idea that can be shared on how that problem can be reduced if not eliminated. In short as a former president once said. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
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