I'm Mad!

From this....



To this....














I'm angry and sad and frustrated. Maybe this is not the forum best suited to say so, but here goes anyway.

Today, we traded in my beloved S.U.V. with leather seats and seating for 8 and dual air and heated seats, and a host of other amenities I never before in my life had in a vehicle up until the day I laid eyes on this one. It was paid for. Yeah, it was a few years old, but I loved that "car."

Why did I trade in the best ride I have ever had? Well, I guess there were a lot of reasons, but in the end it all comes down to one reason---stupid people.

First, I should tell you about what I got from the deal. We traded for a foreign-made diesel car that gets 50 some-odd miles to the gallon. It has all the charm of riding in an MRI machine. It is noisy, it is cramped to the point of making me claustrophobic, and it is virtually impossible to turn and see what your toddlers are doing in the back seat. I don't even want to think about how painful it will be to install and repeatedly buckle child seats. The field of vision in it is about 30% of what I had in my S.U.V., and you'd better pray that the other party in the bucket seat 6 inches away bathed today, because you will be close!

But, it gets 50 miles to the gallon. That should make it o.k. But it does not make it o.k., and I am not thrilled that I can now go 600 miles on a tank of gas and have a car payment to boot!

I took my American-made vehicle, and I surrendered a part of my life to these terrorists in the oil market. I feel violated. I feel cheapened. They won--I didn't.

We have to wake up in this country. What is happening to us? This once-great land of freedom and opportunity is turning into a land of disenchantment. Slowly, bit by bit, we are letting every other country on this planet dominate us and tell us how not-so-good our standard of living will be from here on out.

Where is our President? Why aren't those who represent us fighting mad? It is because those they represent (that would be the rest of us) are not fighting-mad. We are just happy as larks to pull out the old wallet and plop down $50 or $60 for a fill-up of gasoline that will last us two or three days. We quit worrying about the old folks who can't pay their utility bills a long time ago. Now, they just freeze to death in winter and die from heat stroke in the summer. And no one really cares, because, after all, the old people of our society are really of no value to the present generation.

Illegal immigrants are running across the borders, and now, they use our laws to demonstrate in our streets and tell us how badly we are treating them. And we let them.

It is all so wrong. Most of us can see the problems clearly, but we are so busy getting fat and lethargic in the drive-thru's of America or so busy amassing our better homes and cars and clothes and 401k's that we don't see the enemy at the door ready to take it all. We are too busy hammering out the house plans for our 3rd house in 5 years and filling up all our available land with more new houses than the infrastructure can possibly support, and we just go work more hours to pay for it all, instead of just putting our feet down and saying, "Stop the madness! No more!"

Someone with vision and eloquence takes the time to sit down and compose an email that stirs our hearts, and it takes us about 60 seconds to forget it. We nod our heads in agreement and make a mental note to self to do something about that tomorrow.... and we forget, go on, and nothing changes.

Like my husband says about "altar calls," everyone does not get to the same place at the same time. I am here to say, we'd all better start moving in unison toward getting this nation back to where it needs to be or we'd all better start learning a foreign language.

I did not win today when I took away some oil sales from the greedy nations that have what we need because we are too lazy to kick the grey matter into gear and come up with some way to break our chains to them. They won, because they took away my freedom and my happiness in driving an automobile made in my own country and a vehicle that had a lot of sentimental attachment. It's not that we should get attached to stuff, but when you have an old broken-in truck that fits you well, it's sure a shame to give it up over inflated oil prices.

I would say, "Folks, it is time to wake up!" But nobody will and no one does, because the only thing that is going to stir the putrid, rotten, festering pot of apathy in our nation is when some more fellows in dresses and funny hats slice off another arm of our homeland and hand it back to us like they did on 9/11. When we are wounded and bloodied, and the focus shifts from the fantasy world of "Idol" and "24" and "Desperate Housewives" to the real-life drama of how the rest of the world is calculatedly sucking the life right out of our nation and the hope out of our future----when the sacrifice of over 2300 young men and women who took the fight to them so they would not come to us means something to those of us who have never worn the uniform of our country----maybe then, we will stop all the casual bantering about what we maybe could do in 10 years if we start planning now and actually decide to DO something about this mess we are in.

I am so fired up that I don't even care if I ended the last paragraph with a preposition.