Ben Franklin says: “Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.”

I was raised that if you couldn’t say anything nice, you didn’t say anything at all and to respect your elders.20141024_075304

I was taught by a hard working iron worker that politics and religion were private, not for public discussion and that family was first and country was second.  I was also taught by my mother, who was a cook for the public school system and then at a local college, that you were polite to your guests, made them welcome in your home and acted correctly in public so as to not disgrace your family.

Having said all of that, having lived by those rules for most of my life, I must step out of my comfort zone and say this.  The debt of this country is not only unreal to me but an albatross around the neck of my beloved country.  I am not a democrat, nor am I a republican and definitely I am not a socialist; I am however an American with a thinking mind.  I think that there are some good ideas from the democrats and the republicans but not enough that I want to swallow whole all of their tenets without hesitation.

What is weighing on me is the massive amount of debt that seems have no way of paying it off.  If this indebtedness belonged to a family, they would have long ago declared bankruptcy and bowed their head in shame at the senselessness of their previous life style.  The family would have performed an intervention at the spiraling ruin of their child and done everything possible to stop the destruction.  Yet it seems to me that we, as citizens of this great nation, do absolutely nothing to stop or slow down the destruction of our nation that is before us.

Shakespeare says in Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 75–77:

Polonius:
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

I fear for the future of my country.  I feel that we, as US citizens, should have an anger at the sloppiness of how our country has been ran.  I do not believe in casting blame to the point of inaction.  We know what was done and we know how to correct the problem.  We just may not like the solution that is required.  But it is time to put on our big boy/girl panties and do what needs to be done.  Bickering, name calling, slinging mud will not fix the problem.  Maybe the solution is as simple as my mother made it.  Everyone had to hug the person they were upset with and hug it out until Mother thought we had learned our lesson to get along.  It worked for me.  How about you?

http://www.usdebtclock.org