Get Out and Vote

The election is upon us.

Go out and do your duty.

Do it in the knowledge that things in this nation and in this state must change.

Understand that whomever you choose to vote for in this election, the winner will not be panacea for everything that is wrong with the economy.

Nor will the election of one man over the other in the gubernatorial race lead to what is necessary – and what is necessary is a revolution rather than a reformation.

Neither the nation nor the state can continue burying itself in taxes and overspending.

Nations and states that consistently do this condemn themselves to ultimate bankruptcy.

In many respects, we are already a bankrupt nation.

Our debt is so great now that there is very likely no real coming back from it.

Our dependence on foreign oil has helped to bankrupt us. Yet we refuse to conserve and we complain about wind energy being too expensive to develop and that windmills will ruin the landscape.

Far better to have a ruined landscape than $150 a barrel oil and no one driving down to a Cape emptied of tourists by the high price for gasoline.

As a nation, as a state, we do not want to face the harsh reality that we have dug ourselves into a deep hole.

No one wants to suffer.

No one wants to sacrifice.

There’s hardly a person or a political party that speaks reasonably or rationally for all of us.

What we have in this election is anger mixing with hope without much vision from anyone about how this nation and our state will get through the brave new world we are living in.

At the national level we are running two costly wars, shedding precious American blood, for people in two nations who don’t like us and who tend to loath women and our way of life.

Social Security and Medicare are absolutely positively going to be bankrupt in a short time but there is no urgency at the highest levels to change the ultimate outcome.

Health insurance costs are rising unabated and yet there are millions insistent on repealing the recently enacted health care bill because so many didn’t want it.

In Massachusetts we have an underfunded $22 billion pension system for public employees. The pension system was recently reformed but in the years to come, unless something substantial is done, the system will collapse under the weight of its debt.

We have hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents asking for lower taxes and many candidates promising that.

The same people crying for lower taxes don’t want cuts in school spending for their children or public safety cuts of police and firemen – but they want lower taxes.

One doesn’t go without the other.

In large part, the system begins and ends at the ballot box. It is changed at the ballot box

So get out and vote.