We Didn't Start The Fire.......

I've turned off the news again today.

It's the same stories repeated over and over, each time with a little bit more added on to try to keep you interested in this newest development, and most of the "new developments" are from a single person's point of view, meant to cause hate and discontent.  Having spent a lot of time over the past couple of decades looking into our nation's history, I have a hard time with current news thinking this is all brand new and we should be getting all hyped up over such as this:

Obama bypassed Congress recently to gain the release of a prisoner of war.  Oh gee!  In today's theory that we should impeach the man for this, what would today's press have done with Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

(Check out this news story from January:  Presidents who've bypassed congress)

Looks to me like someone who was calling for impeachment a couple of days ago needs to read their US History.

I'm also seeing a bunch of stories about kidnapping victims, like the trio from Ohio, who are being found after decades of imprisonment and abuse.  Now, I live in a very small town with over an acre of property, and if I'm out working on my garden with a radio running a couple of feet away, I have a neighbor who will send the police over to ask me to "turn down the music" that I can't even hear if a car is going by.  I've walked officers through my entire home, including down into my basement, to prove that the barking dog they've been sent to investigate DOESN'T belong to me.  Yet, in Ohio, reports of women screaming didn't even get a police drive by or, if the police DID respond, didn't evoke a complete walk-through in order to prove that there were no women, ANYWHERE in the house, who might be getting raped and tortured?

Looks to me that the person who did the kidnapping isn't the only one who kept these kidnapping victims imprisoned when, even in the Jaycee Dugard story, they didn't take a walk through the back yard "compound" of a man who was a known sexual offender just on the off chance that one of those sheds he had in his back yard - which neighbors had reported CONSTANTLY as hearing suspicious noises from - to see if maybe this sick little monkey and his equally sick wife might possibly have someone back there they were torturing.

And of course, all the posts about prices going up and who we should be blaming for it.

Um, people??  Who was it that changed the laws so that the police can't go into homes without six tons of paperwork being done first or the owner's permission?  Who is it that takes money from oil company lobbyists and looks the other way when the oil companies put the cost of oil and gas up?  Who is too busy arguing "across the aisles" instead of using a little common sense that says that, if we ignore intelligence saying that we're about to be attacked, we should DO SOMETHING to prevent that attack?

That would be the liars and thieves that have been put into political office because you weren't paying proper attention and started to allow lobbyists to fund political parties.

In the past in America's history, who had the most money to put into the hands of the politicians to have laws changed to protect "personal property" (including public domain) so that we now need to protect the privacy rights of people like Ariel Castro and Philip Garrido?  Um, yeah.  That would have been those like Al Capone and other Mafia bosses when the police were able to gain warrants too easily, cutting into the profits of the cartel big-wigs.  Instead of now being allowed to use some common sense, such as hearing a baby cry when there isn't supposed to be a baby on the property and investigating to make sure all is well, the police have to go through ten tons of red tape, and by the time they get done with all the tape, decades have passed and a young girl who disappeared on her way to school has two children older than she was when she was abducted; or there's a dead mother and children who were gunned down by the man they had a restraining order against because his privacy was more important than the rights of his wife and children to be assured by his parole officer that he didn't get his hands on a gun; or there's some idiot who should have never been allowed to carry a gun in the first place gunning down young men in hoodies under the pretense of being a "neighborhood watch captain" who is protected by one of those laws that some politician put into place because someone paid the right amount of cash into a political campaign.

When we want to fuss and fight over our current state of affairs, how about look back at the way things were when white man first started to appear on this continent in the big boats from away?  Our forefathers had been subjected to unequal laws that protected the rich and constantly put the poor man at the fuzzy end of the lolly pop.  The initial group of rules they established, including the separation of church and state, were designed to change that, beginning with these words:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."  (taken from http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html)


There was also a Declaration of Independence - which we used to learn in school, but I'm not sure that they still fully teach - which begins:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness  (taken from: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html)

So, if you ask me, what we have here in the United States is a government that has gone to the kind of government our forefathers hopped onto big ships to escape.  What the politicians who refuse to raise the nationwide minimum wage while giving themselves yet another "cost of living" wage because they can't afford the yacht to go with their mansion any more won't remind you of is the people who came here with little but the clothes on their backs, subjecting their families to hostile natives who didn't like white men invading their country, bringing diseases they'd never heard of and had no immunity against, who were just as apt to kill you as look at you.

Our politicians and law makers USED to be common folk like us, who didn't make any more from their time in office as I might make working up the street in the local general store, and they sure as heck didn't get a "forever wage" for serving for a very short time.  We all remembered that these people were regular joes, who were hired to run the country for a short time, then they went back to their regular jobs and were rarely heard from again.  They used to consider what the lobbyists, Wall Street types, etc are doing as bribes, and laws weren't made on the merits of a bribe.

Before there were bribes running this country, common sense ruled more.

You didn't see the President going through Congress and being blamed for their dragging their feet (Bengazi) who decided to ignore Congress to try something on his own to gain the release of an American who had already caused several deaths and avoid further deaths.

You didn't see the rights of a sexual offender protected over the rights of the little girl he kidnapped and tortured for almost two decades.

There were mistakes, sure enough, but they weren't taken by the media and beaten well beyond the point that the "horse" had died and should have been buried.  We had the common sense to tell our media to SHUT THE F*&% UP and DROP IT!  We had the common sense to stop, investigate on our own, and realize that things aren't always like what we're seeing on television, and that we shouldn't let one media mogul's private agenda skew our view of the world and what we need to do to make it a better place.

Thank you for reading through my rant and for adding any thoughts, whether you agree with me, disagree, or have an entirely new take on something I  mentioned or neglected to mention that I may not have thought of yet.

Thank you, especially, for putting this blog at over 1100 views in less than a year.