Thursday, November 28, 2013

Dear Mr. President

This is a Thanks Giving message.

Thanks to you and your Administration for "hanging in there." First, thanks for running for President, and then running for reelection. Thanks for devoting these last five years and the coming three years of yours and your family's life to working for the enduring presence of our  Nation as a symbol and model of freedom and liberty for all.

Nobody said it would be easy, and, as you know, probably better than anyone, it has been at times excruciatingly difficult. There are a lot of individual things that I could name for which I thank you and your Administration, and for which I think that most of our brothers and sisters thank you. However, just let me say that I loved your comments last Monday regarding shifting our efforts from bombs to diplomacy in order to bring rationality and sanity into the International conversation regarding how we all need to live together on this rather tiny planet.

“Tough talk and bluster may be the easy thing to do politically, but it’s not the right thing for our security." To me your "signal" re the Shift from might to Right was the light at the end of the tunnel of ego insanity through which humanity has been plodding for centuries. It is, as you undoubtedly realize, the only way out. Thanks to the tunnel vision of fear and greed which has been driving us over the last 100 years, we can currently, and rather easily, destroy the whole planet.

With this shift I am hopeful that we can as well, rather rapidly now, shift a significant amount of our resources, that is our tax dollars, from might to Right. I have in mind our Infrastructure by which I mean a lot more than our roads and bridges. These are, as we can easily see in videos of collapsing bridges and broken highways, in terrible condition, and putting resources into their reconstruction would greatly improve the circulation of energy; i.e., money through our national body. All good!

Not so easily seen is the 30 or 40 year decay of the basic infrastructure of our Democracy, our educational systems. All of them are in pretty bad shape, but primarily the elementary systems are near collapse. These infrastructure failures are not so easily seen, but very evident in many ways that cannot compete for attention with collapsing bridges, and many, many times more destructive.

This is a problem that can only be fixed by throwing resources, our tax dollars at it. Those dollars would employ vastly more people, thus circulate vastly more energy, money, than working on the dense physical infrastructure. The reconstruction of our dense physical infrastructure is very important. I am sure we can do both simultaneously. This would solve many problems re. unemployment and so forth.

I know that you and your administration know vastly more about this than I do. So, for me it's a matter of priorities. Health care for everyone was/is a huge priority. Educating the electorate is the most significant thing we can do to further the Dream. Healthy, uneducated people are great for totalitarian systems. Democracy only works if the electorate can think.  I am urging that you make the reconstruction of our educational systems priority One

Lots of love

-tom