ksense

Michael Krull of Insider Iowa hit the nail on the head.

http://insideriowa.com/index.cfm?nodeID=18005&audienceID=1&action=display&newsID=5661

“To paraphrase White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, you should never waste a good crisis.  The state should use the budget challenges to re-order priorities, combine functions such as purchasing, and eliminate obsolete or unneeded programs or departments, and do the other things that a business would normally do when faced with a similar problem, in order to position the state for the future.

The silver lining of this budget crisis is a vision of a future Iowa that comes out the other side as a more competitive state with a lean and more efficient government that provides higher-quality services at lower cost”.

On the other side of the issue, Krull’s counterpart Arnie Arnesen Claims, “they must not show “indifference” but revisit state fiscal relief and expand essential work projects that create jobs at home and pay state bills”. Just what good ole FDR would say.

Why must we always look outside of our family units and the neighbors we know in order to solve our personal crises? What ever happened to personal responsibility and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to solve a problem or overcome a crisis?

Thus is the enlightened “progressive” culture we live in. Government, not our families are our solace. Government not our churches are our strength. Government not our neighbors are our keepers. It has become our excuse for not helping our neighbors. After all Uncle Sam is going to come and take care of everything so why should we keep our eyes open and be aware of our neighbors.

Do we believe so little in our selves and each other that we have to look to an entity with which we have no personal bond to save us from our lives.

I thought we were here on earth to learn how to live, be strong and independent yet have a sense of codependency with our neighbors as we face the vicissitudes of life. This is what the French Author Tocqueville saw when he came and studied America, as he tried to understand why it had become such a great nation.  He found us living in communities and creating vestiges of security held together by the mutual compassion of the neighbors and extended families in the community.

You cannot recreate the type of community Tocqueville found with an impersonal government of a country with 300+ million people. We have to go back to taking care of our neighborhoods, watching over our neighbors, and loving our neighbors if we are to save ourselves from the abuse of power of a centralized government that believes it knows better than we do how to take care of ourselves

When I came to Iowa, I was overcome with the neighborliness of my community. I was not used to this. My neighbor came and helped me mow my overgrown lawn; they brought us things we needed without us asking; they graded our driveway when the deep snows fell. And you know what, they had no edict from the government.

The critic of limited government will say. Look around. See the suffering. People aren’t taking care of each other. My response would be, “yes, you’re right they aren’t helping as they should”; however, I have a question for you. Every time your child doesn’t do something exactly right, do you jump in and save them and fix what they messed up? Or, do you allow them to learn and grow, yea verily, fail sometimes that they might learn through their experience.

A wise God isn’t always there to save the children of the world from the evil around them. Were he constantly present we would not develop the characteristics that would allow us in his perfect presence. Are we smarter than God as we set up governments to save us all from the evils and dangers of the world? Or, are we practicing becoming better people by seeing opportunities to help others and then following through and helping those around us?

Isn’t government, as it tries to “save” us all, doing what Satan did in the pre-existence? He told God that he would go down and make sure everybody returned to heaven by making sure they did good (forcing). Satan’s motives were like the politicians of today, “let the glory be mine”, That’s what Ole Scratch wanted. Isn’t this the end result of giving absolute power to control our lives to the government as they force us to do good for all the people around us by distributing the wealth and creating all these social networks to save us?

Just a thought.