What Colors are on YOUR Ballot?

Here’s a News Flash: we are not electing a Debate Team Leader.

Nor is this coming presidential election entirely about a lagging economy.  The distressed economy is only one symptom of a conflict stemming from two distinct schools of ideology; this election is greater than economics or simple arithmetic. I can only ask my fellow citizens to join me in personally reassessing just where our beloved country is headed.  Consider:

If each voter were to put the Me aside, which of the two front-running candidates would we choose to take the Us onward the next four years?

Garbage-speak comes in many variations and in all colors of the rainbow. Often, it is simply black print.  Sometimes, it is in four-letter-graphics unfit for family viewing.  On occasion, it appears in edited cuts of speeches and discussions, purposely meant to mislead the listeners, instill distrust, and thereby, eventually divide the commonality of the culture.  Students of history, does any of this sound familiar?

Sadly, garbage-speak is strewn across the internet highway and increasingly difficult to discern the more it is repeated: in thirty second sound bites, by entertaining but inaccurate 24/7 news coverage, and by the steady stream of incessant political polls.  None of these practices further educate our younger electorate.  Nor does the repetition of lies or recently enacted, questionable practices instill much confidence among our seasoned citizenry.

While Action may speak louder, Deceit has too long colored our elected servants performances. Infused with pretense and bi-partisan culpability, all federal branches – Executive, Legislative and Judicial – are suspect (if not actually guilty) of one or more infractions; their collective arrogance appears to have absolved them from any wrongdoing.

The checks and balances developed and written into our Constitution by our Founders were specifically designed to prevent government from overreaching and restricting individuals’ liberties. Instead, oaths of allegiance to America’s principles have been tossed to the winds.  In the past twenty years, we taxpaying citizenry have witnessed:

An FBI agents’ raid on an Easter Saturday to abscond a Cuban child and return him to the land his mother died leaving; the much-predicted dissolution of competition and destruction of American industries from Nafta; the rationalization of America’s obligation to the global banking community via Tarp;  the exploitation of party-line, pick and choose corporate welfare; decreased protection of an American citizen’s property rights;  subsequent stimulus’s to failing, scientifically immature enterprises; crisis-oriented, fast tracking of legislation; continued pork barrel spending without an approved budget for too many fiscal years; refusal by a justice to recuse herself from personally familiar, healthcare litigation;  the appointing of czars whose allegiance to various government ideologies are in direct contradiction to the American free enterprise system; and we think the cold war ended? Or that terrorism isn’t homeland bred?

Government does not build anything but debt when it has lost its primary focus to protect the borders and citizenry. Our latter day economic suicide and its willful destruction of our economic super power from within was predicted by ole’ Nikita.  In plain American, “Who’d a thunk it?”

Only those of us who remember his tapping his shoe on the UN podium and promising that he would bury us from within…Given that history often repeats itself and other governments have used their youth to gain footholds en masse, might not this be a coordinated attempt to undermine the Great American Imperialist and bring us to our economic knees?

In my America, I have indeed voted by my pocket book’s lack of green; and yes, in this post Civil-Rights age, I will still vote by color.

As a participant in our free enterprise system, I have been both an owner and an employee. From my own experience, individuals build entrepreneurial opportunities; richer entrepreneurs build corporations; but both employ citizens.  The philanthropic mindset – very much a part of our nation’s economic persona – supersedes a shorter, false start or fast fix.

As an American, I am guilty of idealism, patriotism, and every other ism that can be colored by principled truths, world history, faithful allegiance, and the simplest kindnesses.

As a responsible citizen, I will take on the longer view, asking: what is best for my fellow countrymen, our dependents, our free world allies, and our future generations.

Our nation of immigrants whose work ethic and purpose fabricated Opportunity’s footprint is what I identify with; uncles with accents shared the same vision, and my life experience has shaped my continuing belief in the real, successful economic framework of capitalism’s free market.

After forty years in the American workplace, I still believe.

Thus, I will forever color my votes from the depths of a melting pot culture: that my responsibility is to keep the American Dream color wheel flowing freely for the next generation…