Well….saw a headline in Car and Driver this morning that triggered a flash in this old brain. The title was ‘when did roads become pork?” And, in my fevered brain, that immediately became “when did everything become pork” in our society? There was a time that I can still remember where we were proud of new roads, schools, and other parts of our shared, communal infrastructure and people understood the value to our society of these kinds of projects. Now it seems that any necessary project to keep us even with the rest of the world is met by the excess tax crowd with loud cries of pork, pork, pork, and the projects are deferred by scared politicians who only think as far ahead as their next election. When did we lose our guts to take on the hard projects? And, when did the idea that we are all in this together go away?

Have we become so simplistic in our capacity for thought that slogans are the new thinking? This country became great by big politicians and big citizens who could see past that next election, that could see past the day that their kids grew up and were no longer in school, that could see that the ideal of America IS that we are all in this together and could put their selfishness aside and see that there are limited resources but didn’t mind paying their fair share of the tax burden when it is necessary for the country to go forward. Progress for the whole of the country cannot be left to the private sector whose very existence is based on the “I’ve got mine” premise….as a country we need to stop wasting time and energy on bitching and start doing again….geez….