Get A True Perspective On What Ails America

A number of editorials in major and local newspapers repeat the mantra that the collective "we" caused many of the crises facing us today; that the collective "we" allowed our leaders to be corrupt; that "we" kept putting the same corrupt elected officials in government; that the collective "we" were spend thrifts, using credit cards to buy now and pay later, letting the bills pile up. And what about the credit card corporations?

The editorials also proclaim that most of us are "good people" which validates why the U.S. is the greatest country in the world. With aforementioned comments, this may be a contradiction. If the collective "we" are the basis of this serious crisis, how can "we" be so great?

The answer is that the regular folks, working American citizens, believe in and practice the concepts of the American dream. This has been embedded in our culture for two 200 years. It is not the "we" who created this humongous debacle; it is the corporate government that has victimized working people for decades, that has created one disaster after another, yet foisted the cost onto those working people.

My generation, the children of the "greatest generation" coined by Tom Brokaw, learned from it, as did the greatest generation that survived the Great Depression and World War II. They spawned the greatest period of prosperity in our history; the fact that half of the people in Florida, well represented by retirees from other parts of the country, verify that statement. That happened because they worked 30-40 years, earned pensions and benefits and could afford to buy a home here, maybe even have two homes.

That is, until corporations, assisted by their subsidiary, the federal government, began retracting those pensions and benefits; outsourcing. Still, the cost of this is borne by those workers' tax dollars. The latest example is the $3 trillion handed to Wall Street and bankers with no conditions while the victims of those sub prime mortgages are left hanging.

Congress is still negotiating the bailout of those sub-prime mortgagees. Please note that 40 percent of them qualified for standard 30-year mortgages, but were "steered" into sub-prime mortgages. Also, our middle class is disappearing.

It is ironic after the free bailout of Wall Street and bankers (e.g. AIG,) that Congress jumped all over the auto industry for wanting to borrow funds to avoid bankruptcy. In this case, the auto industry has maintained its commitment to the workers on pensions, etc. while workers elsewhere in the country had lost theirs. The irony is that Congress provided billions of dollars in subsidies to bring Toyota, Honda, etc., to southern states with no unions. Now it wants to kill the unions and bring wages down to non-union levels. Today, minimum wage is the standard with no benefits.

Thus, when those editorials cast the collective "we" as the basis of our current national tragedy, I strongly object; especially when our own government has operated in secret while regular working people were struggling to survive. Even the state of Florida operated in the shade; the people did not know until after the fact what happened (bailing out the insurance and real estate interests, etc.) So the criticism that "we" were not alert is a false charge. How could "we" know if the government actions occurred behind closed doors?

I recall a class in the middle English where we had to translate a passage in the Bible: "Let those with eyes see and those with ears hear." Please seek a true perspective.