Thursday, January 25, 2007

State of the Union

CNN has encouraged people to write their own State of the Union addresses. This is mine. I encourage you to write your own. It's good to crystalize how you think things are going.

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The State of our Union is troubled.

We are a nation at war, with a president who wants to escalate this doomed endeavor. There is no good solution, and there is not going to be. We must remove ourselves from what is a civil matter. This was never about terrorism and it was never our place to be there. We must leave.

We are a nation in debt. Just six years ago, we were a prosperous nation at peace. We now owe more than 8 trillion dollars. Your personal share of that is about $30,000. So is your child's and your spouse's, so your household's responsibility may well be more than you make in a year.

We are a nation in decline. We have children living in poverty. We have schools that teach only based on test scores. We have thousands of citizens who have no health insurance and no access to care. We have prisons that are overflowing, many with convictions that can be traced back to poverty. We have elderly who can't afford their medication and their food. This is a disgrace.

We are a nation contributing to the decline of our planet at a tremendous rate. We have been in an "energy crisis" for more than 30 years and have done very little to address it. We have breached the understood contract we have with our military by asking them to fight for unjust causes, namely so we can have cheap gasoline.

We are a nation of apathy. The citizens of this country must elect people who will lead us into an honorable existence - without war, without poverty, without debt. When you do not vote, or vote for leaders who have no compassion, you get a country that has no compassion. We are living in a country that allows its citizens to die in the streets after a national disaster. We know it's true. We all saw it. Those horrible images remind us of what we have wrought with our votes and our lack of them. If you do not vote, you are voting for "the winner," whoever that may be. You are not absolved of your responsibility. In fact, you must take more responsibility because you could have made a difference and chose not to.

Our nation has always been one of hope and with the recent changes in congress I believe we have turned a corner from despair and are looking to a brighter future. The state of our union is troubled, but we can change it with our votes and our involvement. We must insist that our nation do better for its people and the world.