Dear Senators
Dear Senators:
I
have tried to live by the rules my entire life. My father was a
Command 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 (Obama) spent an estimated $1.4 billion on himself and his family .
The vice president (Biden) spends $ millions on hotels. They have had 8
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. "Obamacare," 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. (Let's eliminate that exemption and put the Congress under the Affordable Health Care Act)
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 and
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 $19
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 the country that I deeply love. You have put it so far in debt
that we will never pay it off while your lot improves by the minute,
because of your power.
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