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Health & Fitness

It's up to Us!

If you have not already voted, get to your polling place and vote. If you prefer to go out on election day, then go on November 6. No excuses are acceptable. We have this one chance to get it right!

 

by Nancy Thorner and Jane Keill

It’s up to Us

As children we are taught not to hate. We do not hate Democrats themselves, but it is what they represent, their ideology, and most certainly their policies and legislation that we cannot abide.

Particularly worrisome is how our Constitution is so cavalierly treated and even ignored by those who consider themselves superior to the intellect of our Founding Fathers, as attempts are made to decry this document as antiquated and no longer relevant to this day and age.

With heavy hearts, having viewed with misgivings and fear what has happened over the past four years, the gravity of the present situation demands that we present an overview of the last four years on the cusp of what we and others view as the most important election in this nation's history.

For more than 50 years, the Liberal/Progressive Democrats have steadily inched their way toward a socialistic, government-will-take-care-of-everything system in the United States.  Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Pell Grants, WIC/food programs, the Great Society, War on Drugs, War on Poverty………hundreds of endless programs that have wasted billions and billions of dollars and not solved the problems for which they were intended no matter how compassionate they were.

Along the way, some occasional Republicans would try halting this progression for a time, but inevitably the votes swung back to the Progressives and they have continued their march toward the Nanny State.

Sadly, we have allowed it to happen. ‘We’ is the current mature generation, the Baby Boomers, which have consistently voted politicians into office who were marching down this Liberal path. Politicians elected to office over and over again have accumulated years of power and influence which they have used to their advantage and that of their party.

In recent years, the roadway leading to government control of just about everything has been lengthened and widened. There’s been more and more leeway in enforcing the laws (illegal immigration, guns, traditional marriage). There’s been softer and softer interpretation of the US Constitution, laxer and laxer application of our laws until ‘We’ elected the Democrats to Congress in 2007, 2008, 2009. It was in 2008 when the perfect storm cloud of liberal domination came to fruition.
 
We elected Barack Obama as President.

Many voted for Obama, proud that he was the first person of color ever elected, who further promised to reach across and heal the racial divide. Instead, Obama came with an agenda that most of us didn’t know existed -- to change America in directions we did not recognize. Along with full Democrat control in the Senate and in the House in 2008 and 2009, the ideal conditions existed to wreak Obama’s will on the country. For two years, President Obama got what he wanted, and the Democrats gave it to him (Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, two Supreme Court liberals).

Delete:  Straying again from the subject:   Obama seems to show contempt instead of respect for this nation and in so doing has usurped the Constitution by appointing leftist czars to bypass Congress, which, in the natural order of things would be impeachable.
 
There was a brief braking in the Democrat’s momentum in 2010 when the Tea Party stood up to be counted because no one else would. Republican leaders, displaying a lack of spine that so often defines them, weren’t stepping up to the plate and rarely spoke up against anything that was being done. House Speaker John Boehner, Minority Senate Leader, Mitch McConnell and Congressman/Senator Mark Kirk failed to step forward to raise anything remotely resembling strength or courage. Even after the 2010 election when the Republicans took control of the House, they couldn’t leverage any effective action, always wailing that ‘This is the best deal we could get.’ Again and again, their bargains with Obama and the Democrats ended up in impotency.

When the President began to issue Executive Orders that changed standing laws and breached the Constitution, barely a voice of objection was heard. Certainly, our elected Republican representatives couldn’t find their voices.

Under Obama and the Democrats (and with the complicity of the Republicans), the United States has been buried in trillions of dollars of debt, much of it borrowed, along with government printing presses churning out money like there was no tomorrow. In the coming years, the taxes related to Obamacare, an outdated tax system, government overspending and the entitlement programs already underway will bankrupt the country.

In the state of Illinois, corruption and lying and graft and bribery are so epidemic that we have sent four governors (of both parties) to prison in the last 40 years. The state is so deeply in debt we will never pay it off. Taxes go forever upward. Spending also continues to spiral forever upward. Illinois has been controlled by the Democrats for most of the last 30-40 years, but the Republicans are just as deep in the muck as their colleagues across the aisle. And, ‘we’ continue to elect them, year after year after year.

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune suggested that no one should vote for a Democrat congressman in Illinois even if he/she is a good person, as this might be the only way to get rid of Speaker Mike Madigan who exerts tremendous destructive power and control in the state. With power comes control, which Madigan demands and gets.  Yet who is to say that Republicans wouldn't abuse power in time if entrusted with control of the Legislature?

What then must we do? Each of us must stop, look and evaluate how we have been voting over the years, who we have elected, what we have supported and what we got out of it all. Illinois, California, New York – all Democrat states -- are in critical financial trouble. Who put them in these positions? If you have contributed to these problems, you must stop to rethink your support for the politicians and party that put these states in such conditions.
 
Our children and grandchildren are waiting on the other side of the precipice. Most of them have no real idea of what’s coming at them. Many of them have been indoctrinated to believe this is the way it’s supposed to be. They don’t know any better and many are too young to know as we do a different kind of America. In future generations, they will never believe there was a different America. Sadly no one will be around to tell them about it. Their history books will have been scrubbed of information that would give insight into how things used to be, as those in power know that ignorance is the best way of keeping control of young minds.

Now, we have one last opportunity to bring this juggernaut to a halt. We have one last election to put a solid roadblock in the path although what has already been set in place will be difficult enough to halt.  We have to take responsibility for what we haven’t done during the last 50 years. We have to save our country.

On November 6, we must stand up and take back control of our leaders in Washington, DC. We must elect Republicans to enough positions that we can keep control of the House of Representatives, gain control of the Senate and replace Obama in the White House. That will at least slow the movement of the Liberal/Progressive/Democrat Party.

And, after that, we must continue to rein in those we have just sent to Washington. Despite their campaign promises, they will quickly slip into the mire and do what politicians always do – grasp for power. We will have to keep after them using all of our resources – Facebook, Twitter, texting, e-mails, phone calls, letters – whatever will get us in their faces. And, we must stand strong against their weakness and make sure they go in the direction we want them to go – not in the direction they wish to take us.

If you have not already voted, get to your polling place and vote. If you prefer to go out on election day, then go on November 6. But, get there. No excuses are acceptable. We have this one chance to correct our past votes. Take it.

It’s up to us.

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