Musings

I read an article today in the Washington Post with the headline, “Obama’s New Strategy: blaming Bush for mess”. I rather doubt it. It seems to me that the President is simply pointing out that the problems are historic, pervasive, and coming at him from all fronts.

Instead of promising to fix everything, and throwing money at problems that may no longer be controllable by conventional means, he needs to show true leadership by making the public face the horrifying fact that the government can no longer afford to be a nanny to everyone, and that failed businesses must be allowed to fail. In addition, the ideas of reforms to the educational and health care systems at this time, while noble, are like taking the top down on a convertible in the middle of a hurricane, and hoping for the sunshine.

Health care is a luxury not a ‘right’, and education is properly the responsibility of parents, not institutions, in tough economic times. Shrinking tax revenues cannot fund expensive new programs and old entitlements; to think it true is to engage in delusional and destructive behavior.

What we need are not noble ideas, but ideas for containment of disasters that are about to get out of hand. The Government needs a laser-like focus on the things that may give us a knockout punch. While I hope our economic troubles go away with all of the financial fixes underway, we also need a plan ‘B’.

For example, tent cities of the homeless are springing up within urban areas all over America. These now consist of former middle class citizens as well as the poor, and are growing so fast, they can’t endure for long. To make matters worse, nature and the economy have conspired to restrict the planting and harvesting of crops, accelerated the destruction of the dairy industry & animal husbandry, and a diminishing supply of safe drinking water now threatens many regions of the country with high population densities.

To rely on imports from other countries and hope for the best is foolish in the extreme, and we may wind up with mini-Darfurs all over the country.

Add to this, the potential for mass migration from areas that are seeing jobs disappear and markets shrink, and the growing potential for international conflicts to arise from similar problems elsewhere.

We need to be thinking about a rebirth of the CCC Corps (staffed by the homeless & tasked with environmental remediation), how to implement martial law and restrict migration in certain areas, and plan government distribution of life-vital goods and services. Instead of 'imposing democracy' on peoples who don't want it, we need to turn our military loose on the root source of the conflicts that plague us, and bring them to an end quickly, instead of making our armies fight with one arm tied behind their backs. Our military needs to be redeployed here at home, along our borders, as fast as possible.

In my view, none of the problems I’ve touched on above are blips that will go away soon. The ugly truths must emerge and be discussed openly. We need to take our medicine for the excesses of the past, and get on with building a sustainable future for American citizens in a world of diminishing resources, exploding populations, and an unstable climate.

This means long-term strategic planning, and executing those plans exactly, regardless of regime change or reform of our public institutions. The future we have been silently dreading for years is now upon us, and we should not be applying Band-aid solutions. Throughout history, countries have changed dramatically, and the USA, like many others, is not immune to changes of fortune.