Saving America - one bad idea at a time

I sometimes find myself steeped in surprise over the changes that have occurred. Just in my fifty five years of living in small town America, in small town New England, I have seen the pace quicken, the quiet expire and the quest for, "little of your needs and all of your wants" take center stage.

Classes in Mindfulness Meditation are being taught in hospitals and in churches to help dispel the clatter in our heads. Serenely soaking in the beauty of rocks and fields and woods requires that we do so with a gun, or a four-wheeler or snowmobile.

Where's Walden?

It is the cost and the growth of things that most amaze me.

In 1967, my small town had one police cruiser and one full time officer. The cruiser also doubled as the ambulance. Move forward to 2010 and it's like going from Mayberry to Hill Street Blues.

Can anybody say S.W.A.T.?

In High School we all drove jalopy's. Today's kids parks their cars in the school lot looking like Fortune 500 executives.

To keep pace with all this expansion we must raise revenue. We do this through absorption; not through sharing. That would be, uh, Socialist: and un-American.

If you look at the tax rate for those at the highest levels of income from 1933 until 2003, you will see that the proverbial rich getting richer is no more truer than it is now. If you can't get the money from the rich it must come into the State and town coffers by way of absorption.

Or more lottery games.

I remember when Massachusetts had a self-sustaining parks & recreation department. Parking was free. Kids and families could play and socialize. Members of our elderly community could picnic in the shade and enjoy the children splashing and laughing. In the name of progress the parks & recreation income became absorbed into the general fund. Each year the State doled out a smaller and smaller budget until what we have now is equivalent to a poorly run and quite pricey zoo.

It cost over $110,000 dollars to house mental health clients in the State Hospital. For $55,000 (more or less) it was decided that we could place them in residential settings and care for them in place that more resemble a home. Yeah. How's that working out? And all that money you're saving? Where has that gone? One of the grave concerns of mental health advocates at the time became, where was the State going to find enough qualified people to work in the residential homes?

It is hard for me to believe that someone was intelligent enough (or sinister enough) to require all hospital and nursing homes nurse's aides to become "State Certified." Many of these low paid, butt wiping positions were filled by uneducated hard working older woman. Some had hearts of gold. Some were like a mother-in-law of nightmare proportions. And many of these woman could not pass the State certification tests.

Where do you think they went? I saw it.

And do you think that our Vets get all that should be coming to them?

And Mitt Romney. Well, because of dumb fucks like this.

Or this.

Or this.

One more dumb fuck with more bad ideas.