I heard something disturbing on the radio this morning. A local radio station had a news break about the government shutdown. The DJ repeated a quote from overseas, stating, "The American government is sucking the blood out of their own people." That's one way of putting it. The problem I had wasn't the quote itself, it's actually quite astute, but who said it. Al Qaeda.
No, I'm not kidding.
For the first time in history, I heard something from these terrorists that didn't make me feel like I'm looking through a red cloud. Nope. This time, they were right. They made sense. F**king Al Qaeda.
What that does say about our country when a group of terrorists make more sense than our "leaders"?
I read an interesting article this week. Apparently, a very similar government dispute happened in Australia in 1975. Parliament couldn't agree on a budget and there was a government shutdown. The Queen of England's right hand man fired the Prime Minister in Australia and appointed a new one. Shockingly, a budget was quickly approved. His first action was to sack the entire Australian Parliament. Boom. No more government shutdown. They haven't had an issue since. Sounds good to me. Of course, it also makes sense, so Lord knows that can't happen here. We're too busy dealing with our seventeenth shutdown. Yes, seventeenth.
Of course, Australia had to have massive new elections to restock their Parliament. Fine with me. Personally, I'm all in for restocking our shelves. Every once in awhile, we need to clear out the old food from the fridge. I can smell that spoiled food in D.C. all the way out here in Starbucksland. Let's toss 'em.
We might elect leaders who actually care about our country. It's pretty obvious that our current "leaders" don't. Listen to any member of Congress, or any news show on any television station, they are always talking about Democrat and Republican strategies. And that's the problem. As usual, they're not prioritizing properly.
Why are they all so worried about their political party and not about the overall country? Why is it always us against them, instead of us working together, to solve a problem? Simple. They don't care. That's why.
Why don't they care? Why don't they do their damn jobs? Because they don't have to.
Has any member of Congress been furloughed? No. Is there even a remote possibility that would happen? No. Does the shutdown effect them at all? No. Everyone hates them anyway; they know it. We know it. No one has any confidence in them; they know it. We know it. It's been that way for years and nothing has changed. So, why should they do their jobs?
Doing your job well comes from two main sources, pride and fear. When people take pride in their work, they want to solve a problem. They stay late, arrive early, communicate with others and compromise to solve the issue. It's obvious, if these "leaders" actually had any sense of pride in doing their job effectively, this shutdown never would have happened. But, it did, and that speaks volumes.
That leaves fear. Most of us know that if we don't do our job effectively, we won't have that job anymore. Anyone think our "leaders" have that same knowledge? I'm thinking, no. What do they fear? Most of them have been there for years, if not decades. They argue and bicker and accomplish nothing again and again and again, and they're still there. They've dug in deep and they're sucking us dry. We need to send in a veterinarian to burn them out like a tick chewing on a dog's flesh.
These "leaders" came to the difficult decision that their members only free gym is "essential" enough to stay open, at tax payer expense. Yet, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta could only keep one person watching for disease outbreaks for our entire country. Today, they brought back numerous more employees when there was an outbreak of eighteen people getting Salmonella from a Foster Farms chicken farm in California.
Apparently, there was sound reasoning behind this decision. "This job is very stressful and if you don't have a place to vent, you are going to go crazy..." said Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska). Yep. Absolutely. Not doing your job and screwing over three hundred million Americans must be exhausting. Grab an extra towel (that we're paying for) when you hit that sauna, Mr. Young. After all, having free access to a basketball court is far more important, excuse me, essential, than the Head Start program. Be sure to follow through with that jump shot, because missing that big shot could add even more stress, and we can't have that.
Something tells me that if we did dump our beloved "leaders", the next group might be a bit more concerned with keeping their jobs, which would mean they might actually do their jobs. Imagine that. Well, imagining is all we can do. We all know there is no way our "leaders" are going anywhere. But, then again, we keep bringing over television shows from across the pond, maybe we can bring some common sense, too.
Or, I could take my family and we could go throw another shrimp on the barbie. After all, summer is right around the corner Down Under. Which makes me wonder, if we all went on "walk-about", would our "leaders" even notice? Or would the steam from the stress-reducing sauna keep fogging up their vision?
