By Guest Blogger Dave Carter
(Dave Carter is a contributor for Ricochet.com, a retired military veteran, and currently a long haul truck driver.)
After a really rough day spent piloting an 18 wheeler through New Jersey traffic, I was ready to begin an in-depth study of the inside of my eyelids when I saw this from USA Today:
One in 45 children in the USA — 1.6 million children — were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, or doubled up with other families last year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness. The numbers represent a 33% increase from 2007, when there were 1.2 million homeless children, according to a report the center is releasing Tuesday.
Then I look at the real unemployment rate, which tops 11 percent when people whose unemployment benefits have expired are included (evidently in the official count, if you’re not receiving handouts you don’t get counted, which keeps the numbers lower than they really are), and it is little wonder that the number of homeless children has increased by a third. Then I see our President, who jet sets from one vacation resort to the next, who dines lavishly, whose White House now contains around 40 Christmas trees, whose family takes his and hers taxpayer-funded jets to and from Martha’s vineyard, who occasionally rouses himself from the golf course and threatens to commit and act of governance against the lot of us, and who has the unmitigated gall, the unfettered nerve, and the stupid audacity to tell the people who hired him that they are soft, or lazy, or arrogant? Can we just pay him to stay on vacation and leave us alone?
I know I should keep it pithy, but quite honestly folks, stories like the one in USA Today leave me more than a little “pithed” off. Americans are the most industrious, the most innovative, the hardest working, and the most successful people on the planet, and that success is due directly to their status as a free people. Unshackle them, get the busybodies of government off their back, and watch them soar. I, for one, can’t wait till 2012. In the interim, forget a sense of shame,…can’t the President at least muster a sense of irony?
