Holiday Wars

Bob Greene posted an article today on CNN.com lamenting that far too many US citizens just don't seem to care that we're at war, and that we've forgotten our brave soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't agree.

One of the tenets of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was that humans can only absorb and deal with so much information - good or bad. We've been fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for over eight years with no apparent end in sight. Do US citizens care that we're still there and that our service men and women are dying? Yes, passionately. But, what is the average citizen to do about it? On a practical level, nothing. Our political "leaders" tell us we'll be engaged in these "wars on terror" for the foreseeable future and they continue to pass spending bills in the hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the wars - however unpopular with the public they may be.

(If you want to watch a fascinating movie, see Charlie Wilson's War staring Tom Hanks. The US Congressman from Texas reminded us that we were heading in this direction and laid out a plan that could have taken us in an entirely different direction.)

In the mean time, bankers and auto executives have so mismanaged their businesses that trillions of dollars of public money (our money in case no one remembers) was required to bail their sorry asses out - and leave them in the jobs. Are there no penalties for incompetence and mismanagement?

As a result of their mismanagement, the US economy was pushed into a massive recession, millions lost their jobs, credit funding for small businesses to create new jobs disappeared and the public has been scared to death.

Add to this the continuing debate to spend more trillions of our dollars on "health care reform" that no one really understands and a failed Climate Change Summit (again, where's the leadership?), is it any wonder that the public is a bit shell-shocked? I think not.

Does the public care? Yes. But, they're getting hammered from every direction on major issues that directly affect their personal and financial lives that they have no control over.

Bob, don't suggest the public doesn't care. They do. Ask our "leaders" in Washington what they're going to do about it. So far, all I've seen are a bunch of lily-livered pansies who only know how to spend our money and make promises of a better life in the future. Well, we're in the future every day and I'm not seeing any progress. We need leaders with cogent plans to end the messes we're in and then implement those plans. The next Congressional and Presidential elections can't come soon enough.