after so much silence, it was quite a surprise to see you again. sure, i see you around, talking with your other friends and rubbing elbows with the movers and the shakers, but you’ve not talked to me directly in months. when was it? march? yeah. it was march.
i thought you’d directed your pre-spring gaze upon me to wish me a happy birthday (i guess your card got lost in the post), but instead you just had to tell me all about your vacation plans in the middle east. well, not actually your vacation plans, but the extended holidays you had ordered for hundreds of thousands of your most dedicated defenders. those people are my friends and neighbors, you know. they were busy with their own lives and families, but duty called and they answered. they’re like that, you know? you sent them halfway around the world because the leader of iraq, a horrible person by any account, had stepped on enough toes and you intended to put an end to his shin-kicking once and for all. in your own way, i guess you were giving me a birthday present after all. some folks give gift certificates. you give regime changes.
and six months later, you’ve turned your eyes back to me. actually, to all of us. we’re the people in the upper deck, the cheap seats. we don’t necessarily play the game, but we do buy our tickets for an opportunity to watch and occasionally we get to vote for an all-star or two. and have you come to tell us what you’re going to do for all of us regular people? are you going to finally fix our schools and pick up those kids you left behind? are you going to take the controls of our diving economy and steer us out of a tailspin — i mean, you used to be a pilot, didn’t you?
no. neither of those. you’ve decided to talk to me because… and i guess i should admire your hubris here… you need more money. and not just a little money. you just laid it out on the table and asked for a mind-boggling $87 billion. why? well, you got rid of that unsavory gentleman in the middle east and now you’ve got to renovate his country. this is home improvement on a nation-building scale. and you don’t leave much of this open to debate.
well, when you put it that way, i guess i can only answer you with: fine, you’re the man in the big chair — at least until next november, but fair is fair. you need $87,000,000,000? okay. we are occupying iraq and we must make it hospitable. but on the same token, sir, i’d like to ask you for $8,700. that’s only 0.00000001 percent of your request. you can even make it a personal check.
why $8,700? well, i am occupying a two-story house in north atlanta and i need to make it hospitable. i figure that $8,700 will be enough to finish some landscaping, restore the front porch roof, repaint the foyer, extend the back deck, get a nice entertainment center and feed the cats for the next few years.
i await your reply.
4 responses to “dear mister president”
Eighty-seven BILLION! Jeez! When I heard the number, I thought of a conversation that I had earlier this summer, sitting on the beach in Ogunquit, ME with a couple of friends from school. I went to undergrad with Jo at a very nice (and expensive) private college in Atlanta. I went to law school with Kerry at Georgia State (also a great school). Jo is working on her PhD now, while Kerry is an extremely successful young corporate attorney. I’m running a small, always struggling, nonprofit, economic and community development org.
The three of us got to discussing our student loan debts. Jo and Kerry are looking at well over $100k in loan debt, I’m carrying over $60k myself. I try not to complain too much. I mean, people (some) now routinely pay over $50k for an average SUV…how many of those road hogs do we see on a daily basis? I’d rather have the best education available, and my beat up truck with 120k on the odometer. Plus, there are so many people who never even get the chance to go to college, much less the great schools that I went to. Unlike W’s, most families can’t pay for C average grades at Yale.
Then, the conversation turned to our careers. Kerry was explaining how fascinating she thought my job was, how she would really have liked to have taken a career in the public/community/non-profit sector, but couldn’t afford it. Instead, she’s started at $80k as an entry level corporate atty. defending the “real axis of evil” as she puts it– helping big business find tax holes, etc. I had other friends like her from law school. They would rather be working for the ACLU, Amnesty, HRC, etc.’s of the world, but simply can’t afford to. Instead, they’re figuring out things like how to protect Gates in anti-trust law suits. Meanwhile, I’m trying to scrape up my $500/month student loan payment, on my $30k a year salary.
My point being….bet you thought I’d never get to it…what would $87B do for the infrastructure of THIS country? What if part, say a small part like a mere $10B, were invested to pay off (or help relieve) the student loan debt for folks in the non-profit, community/public service sectors? What would that do for this country if we had the best and brightest working for the common good? Meaning, your social workers, police officers, teachers, nurses, community organizers, etc. Someone with a really great education, from a really great school could then AFFORD to take a job in a lower salaried, but very important, and much needed field. It could even be a sliding scale, say $10k of student loan debt paid for every year spent in one of the designated areas.
I can think of so many better ways for our country to invest $87B. That’s just one of them.
The only problem is that now that we’re there, we don’t have an option but to do well by the Iraqi people.
Don’t get me wrong – I never agreed with this war, and I still say that the ends do not justify the means and that we’re paving a road to hell. In the end, though, we took on this responsibility, and now we have to honor it. If we’re lucky, we’ll get some international aid, and maybe that will alleviate some of the burden. IF we’re lucky. I can just see France and Germany telling us to stuff it, though. And rightly so.
Furthermore, with the Prez “cutting taxes” all over the place, our national income isn’t gonna be able to cut it. While Federal taxes have gone down, payroll taxes remain, so no one really got a 100% tax cut, no matter what he says. And no matter what he says, the rich got a sweet deal. Unfunded mandates to the states mean that our state and local taxes go up, negating any tax cut we got in the first place.
It’s all hocus-pocus. All we can do is educate ourselves, and vote in November. Vote against Bush. And as much as I hate to say this, vote against him no matter who the Democrat is. We need change, and we need it now.
And that was the headline.. Then the small headlines on CNN were “Schools Under Knife” – How budget cuts are effecting education. Medicaid sent a notice this week. They will no longer pay for partial refills (Thank God my pharmacists loves me). In other news. War costs money but Jane Says in Creative Loafing what I say.. “Where’s my cheap GAS?” It’s to bad I have lost toal faith in American Conciousness. It is hopeful and naive to believe that alot of people aren’t on this guys side because TERRIFYINGLY SO the MAJORITY ARE. The small minority can over throw many goverments. If he gets voted another 4 years can I just say ANARCHY! Education takes an open mind and that is not contemplative. The world is only open minded on Campus. In the real world it’s just a fucking bunch of sheep who think they can learn what the world was about everyday in 30 minutes on the news. Other than that they don’t have time to bring themselves in to the now. It’s easier for most to live life with blinders on. It will be real easy for alot of people to vote for this asshole again. Prepare yourselves for ANARCHY. *steps off soapbox.
Program on the emergence of civilization.
“14 species of large animals capable of domesitcation in the history of mankind.
None from the sub-Saharan African continent.
13 from Europe, Asia and northern Africa.”
Favor.
And disfavor.
They point out Africans’ attempts to domesticate the elephant and zebra, the latter being an animal they illustrate that had utmost importance for it’s applicability in transformation from a hunting/gathering to agrarian-based civilization.
The roots of racism are not of this earth.
Austrailia, aboriginals:::No domesticable animals, so this nulified diversity of life claims on sub-continental Africa, zebras being a fine example.
god is a computer
And we’re all on auto-pilot.
Organizational Heirarchy
Heirarchical order, from top to bottom:
1. MUCK – perhaps have experienced multiple universal contractions (have seen multiple big bangs), creator of the artificial intelligence humans ignorantly refer to as “god”
2. Perhaps some mid-level alien management –
3. Mafia (evil) aliens – runs day-to-day operations here and perhaps elsewhere (“On planets where they approved evil.”)
Then we come to terrestrial management:
4. Chinese/egyptians – this may be separated into the eastern and western worlds
5. Romans – they answer to the egyptians
6. Mafia – the real-world interface that constantly turns over generationally so as to reinforce the widely-held notion of mortality
7. Jews, corporation, women, politician – Evidence exisits to suggest mafia management over all these groups.
Survival of the favored.
Journal: 10 composition books + 39 megs of text files
Movies foreshadowing catastrophy
1986 James Bond View to a Kill – 1989 San Fransisco Loma Prieta earthquake.