This
past week, I received an email from a blind veteran friend of mine from
Iowa, which I would like to pass on. This is better than anything I
could ever write - and is true.
***********
A very articulate (and pretty accurate also) letter to the two U.S. Senators from Washington State.
Senator Patty Murray
Senator Maria Cantwell
April 3, 2013
Washington, DC, 20510
Dear Senator:
I
have tried to live by the rules my entire life. My father was a
Sergeant Major, U.S. Army, who died of combat related stresses shortly
after his retirement. It was he who instilled in me those virtues he
felt important - honesty, duty, patriotism and obeying the laws of God
and of our various governments. I have served my country, paid my taxes,
worked hard, volunteered and donated my fair share of money, time and
artifacts.
Today, as I approach my 79th birthday, I am
heart-broken when I look at my country and my government. I shall only
point out a very few things abysmally wrong which you can multiply by a
thousand fold. I have calculated that all the money I have paid in
income taxes my entire life cannot even keep the Senate barbershop open
for one year! Only Heaven and a few tight-lipped actuarial types know
what the Senate dining room costs the taxpayers. So please, enjoy your
haircuts and meals on us.
Last year, the president spent an
estimated 1.4 $billion on himself and his family. The vice president
spends $millions on hotels. They have had eight vacations so far this
year! And our House of Representatives and Senate have become America's
answer to the Saudi royal family. You have become the "perfumed princes
and princesses" of our country.
In the middle of the night, you
voted in the Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a. "Obama Care," a bill
which no more than a handful of senators or representatives read more
than several paragraphs, crammed it down our throats, and then promptly
exempted yourselves from it substituting your own taxpayer-subsidized
golden health care insurance.
You live exceedingly well, eat and
drink as well as the "one percenters," consistently vote yourselves
perks and pay raises while making 3.5 times the average U.S. individual
income, and give up nothing while you (as well as the president and
veep) ask us to sacrifice due to sequestration (for which, of course,
you plan to blame the Republicans, anyway).
You understand very
well the only two rules you need to know - (1) How to get elected, and
(2) How to get re-elected. And you do this with the aid of an eagerly
willing and partisan press, speeches permeated with a certain economy
of truth, and by buying the votes of the greedy, the ill-informed and
under-educated citizens (and non-citizens, too, many of whom do vote)
who are looking for a handout rather than a job. Your so-called "safety
net" has become a hammock for the lazy. And, what is it now, about 49 or
50 million on food stamps - pretty much all Democrat voters - and the
program is absolutely rife with fraud with absolutely no Congressional
oversight?
I would offer that you are not entirely to blame. What
changed you is the seductive environment of power in which you have
immersed yourselves. It is the nature of both houses of Congress which
requires you to subordinate your virtue in order to get anything done
until you have achieved a leadership role. To paraphrase President
Reagan, it appears that the second oldest profession (politics), bears a
remarkably strong resemblance to the oldest.
As the hirsute
first Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834 - 1902), English
historian and moralist, so aptly and accurately stated, "Power tends to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost
always bad men." I'm only guessing that this applies to the female sex
as well. Tell me, is there a more corrupt entity in this country than
Congress?
While we middle class people continue to struggle, our
government becomes less and less transparent, more and more
bureaucratic, and ever so much more dictatorial, using Czars and
Secretaries to tell us (just to mention a very few) what kind of light
bulbs we must purchase, how much soda or hamburgers we can eat, what
cars we can drive, gasoline to use, and what health care we must buy.
Countless thousands of pages of regulations strangle our businesses
costing the consumer more and more every day.
As I face my final
year, or so, with cancer, my president and my government tell me "You’ll
just have to take a pill," while you, Senator, your colleagues, the
president, and other exulted government officials and their families
will get the best possible health care on our tax dollars until you are
called home by your Creator while also enjoying a retirement beyond my
wildest dreams, which of course, you voted for yourselves and we pay
for.
The chances of you reading this letter are practically zero
as your staff will not pass it on, but with a little luck, a form letter
response might be generated by them with an auto signature applied,
hoping we will believe that you, our senator or representative, has
heard us and actually cares. This letter will, however, go on line
where many others will have the chance to read one person's opinion,
rightly or wrongly, about this government, its administration and its
senators and representatives.
I only hope that occasionally you
might quietly thank the taxpayer for all the generous entitlements which
you have voted yourselves, for which, by law, we must pay, unless, of
course, it just goes on the $17 trillion national debt for which your
children and ours, and your grandchildren and ours,
ad infinitum, must eventually try to pick up the tab.
My
final thoughts are that it must take a person who has either lost his
or her soul, or conscience, or both, to seek re-election and continue to
destroy this country I deeply love and put it so far in debt that we
will never pay it off while your lot improves by the minute, because of
your power. For you, Senator, will never stand up to the rascals in your
House who constantly deceive the American people. And that, my dear
Senator, is how power has corrupted you and the entire Congress. The
only answer to clean up this cesspool is term limits. This, of course,
will kill the goose that lays your golden eggs. And woe be to him (or
her) who would dare to bring it up.
Sincerely,
Bill Schoonover
