We Have to Do Better!

For the last 25 years, we, the American people, have been sold a bill of goods!

Dr. Errington Thompson

The pitch, on one level, appeals to our natural sense of right and wrong. We’ve been told that we pay too much in taxes. We get taxed in the morning as we drive to work. We clearly get taxed on the money that we make at work. We come home, we kiss our spouse, and we get hit with the marriage tax! As we make our way to the kitchen we trip over toys that we bought for our kids, and of course, those toys were taxed. We’re taxed morning, noon, and night! Finally, when we leave this earth, we’ll be taxed again — with the death tax!

We’ve also been told
that our government is not to be trusted. If you give money to the
government, it’s equivalent to flushing it down the drain. Some of our
elected leaders have gone so far as to say, flushing money down the
drain is actually a better use!
The take home lesson is that our government is wasteful, and we are
taxed to death! Cool story. Unfortunately, the reality is different
from this fantasy world.

This week we clearly saw the results of 27 years of cutting needed
government programs and government spending of money we don’t have. The
evidence has been all around us, but we’ve refuse to see how our
infrastructure is crumbling. Nor have we invested in our schools,
roads, government buildings, levees, and of course bridges.

As I’ve pointed out in my book, “A Letter to America,” taxes are like
membership fees to an exclusive club. The United States of America is
the club that we belong to, and our club used to treat us like
exclusive members. The perks were; if you worked hard in school you
were almost guaranteed a job for which you would be well-paid. You
could be secure in the knowledge that so long as you did a good job,
your employment was secure until you retired. Once retired, you would
have a generous pension that made all those years of hard work worth
it. However, like any club, when you reduce the amount of perks that
allowed the club to be exclusive, being a member became less attractive.

One miscarriage of our membership has wreaked havoc upon the gorgeous
city of Minneapolis. If you’ve never been there, I hope you have an
opportunity in the future. I’ve also driven over the I-35 Bridge which
spans the Mississippi River. When I heard the news of the collapse, I
shifted into trauma mode! I had driven over those same stress points
and weak spots that caused the destruction of the bridge and at least
five lives. Guess I was lucky.

Being a trauma surgeon my thoughts were of the first responders,
hospitals, and the trauma centers. Also, sadly my thoughts turned to
the victims and their families as well. The more I watched, the more my
empathy and sorrow turned into to disappointment, and I began to wonder
if there is anything that we can now trust from our government. What
are the basic needs that we ought to expect our government to provide
for its membership?

Our bridges should be maintained in such a way that they do not
collapse! We should be able to drink a glass of water from our own tap
without having to worry about the mercury or arsenic levels in that
water! We should be able to buy pet food from the grocery store and not
have to worry that it will be safe enough to nourish our pet! We should
be able to book a flight and have 95% confidence that the flight will
take off on time, land on time, and that our bags will be delivered on
time to our destination. These are some of the things that we depend on
our government to do. If we need to raise our membership fees in order
to get these things accomplished, I’m willing to pay more.

Tony Snow, the White House Press Secretary, informed us that the I-35
Bridge which collapsed in Minneapolis was rated a 50 on a scale from
one to 120. This study was conducted two years ago to study the
bridges’ structural integrity. According to the American Society of
Civil Engineers, a little over 27% of our bridges have been labeled as
structurally deficient or functionally obsolete and according to the
same study, we would need to spend a little over $9 billion a year for
20 years to fix these deficiencies. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t
want to drive over a bridge that is rated 50 on a scale from 1-120. I
would like my bridge, (with reference to my membership perks), to be
rated 95%, or better!

I’m also a little tired of driving past middle schools and high schools
that look as if they need to be condemned. Educational environments,
whether old or new, must be, at a minimum, clean and safe. In order to
turn our country around, we will have to change our mindset. Currently,
politicians are trying to sell to many of us some cockamamie schemes,
because they recognize we all too often think only of how it will
“benefit me.” When we change our mindset and think of the common good,
we will begin to think in terms of what is in the best interest of all
of us! This is not some Karl Marx communistic/socialistic ideology.
Instead, this is democracy! Remember, our Constitution starts with the
phrase “We the People…”
According to the Congressional Research Service, we are now spending
over $12 billion a month on the “War on Terror.” Do you feel safer? It
seems that every week there is a new terror threat. Are we being
fooled? Whether it’s the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) —
which desperately needs to be fixed, in spite of the fact that it’s
been amended every year for the last five years, or the elusive Osama
bin Laden, our government seems to be conducted in a state of paranoia
and pandemonium.
I’m not saying there are not terrorists in the world that are plotting
to harm Americans. I am saying that if we’re going to spend $12 billion
per month on “The War on Terror,” shouldn’t we be getting more for our
money? Shouldn’t we at least get peace of mind?
There is much work that our government officials need to be doing:
health care, social security, education, and repairing our crumbling
infrastructure. As an American citizen, my job is to make sure that I
elect the best people for the job. They may not have the best hair, or
the best smile and certainly not the one with the most money. Instead,
it must be the person who is the most analytical and thoughtful as well
as possessing the ability to look at all available “data,” and make the
right decision.
Finally, it must also be a person who can keep an open and intelligent
mind and neither to proud nor stubborn to change that mind in the face
of new information.
In order for democracy to work, we have to do our part. We have to be
collectively engaged. We have to go to town hall meetings. We have to
write letters. We have to register and vote our convictions.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, a Swiss philosopher, said “Born as I was the
citizen of a free state… the very right to vote imposes on me the
duty to instruct myself in public affairs…”
We have to do better, for only then will we have a government we can
trust to act in our best interest. Now, that would be a government of
the people, by the people and for the people.