Wednesday, October 11, 2000

By AMY RILEY
One Citizen's Perspective

For those of you who are watching and waiting with bated breath to see who the American public will place at the helm of the ship, please consider that we are living with the aftereffects of political power run amok.

Increasingly, those who govern have lost touch with the governed. Powers that should belong to the states, as ordained by our constitution, have been usurped by the federal government. In turn, powers that should be the domain of local governments are under siege by the states.

We are paying the highest rate of taxes comparatively since World War II, and at the same time, militarily, we are dangerously low in the readiness department, according to recent Congressional testimony.

Many Americans are living in their own third worldesque hell's kitchen, but increasingly our resources are being spent improving the lives of faraway peoples in faraway places.

What has happened to America? Are we the product of our own making, or have we become pawns in a twisted scheme to "redefine government?"

I consider this election to be THE election of all time, not because there are huge differences between the two major party candidates, but because the differences that are there are huge.

Let's look at truthfulness. As Americans, have we not had enough of blatant truth distortion and double-speak in the last eight years? If we had, wouldn't Gore's propensity for untruths have already lost him this race?

We've seen Gore lie about being lulled to sleep by a union label jingle that wasn't written until he was in his late twenties. We've seen him claim to have invented the Internet, when all he really did was introduce a big spending bill in Congress to invest in it. We've seen him lie about past fund-raising illegalities. We've seen him be party to all of the transgressions of the current administration save one.

Then, he stood and lied last week to beat the band about some old lady who spent her days walking the roadways of her community picking up cans to pay for her prescription drugs. This is the same lady who gassed up her Winnebago and came all the way to the east coast to swoon for Gore at last week's debate. (By the way, spell check suggested "windbag" as a substitute for Winnebago.)

In the days to follow, her son acknowledged on talk radio that he was responsible for helping out his mother financially, but that she refused to accept money for her prescriptions. Staged?

Raise your hand if you think that the government's commandeering of prescription drug coverage is going to help you get the medicines you need when you are sick.

Also in the debate last week was a real tear-jerker about a girl whose Florida classroom was so overcrowded she had to stand up in class. Truth?

It was the first day of school and about $100,000 worth of new equipment, still in the boxes, had not been unpacked and was being stored in her classroom. The child sat on a stool for one class period. All of this was confirmed the morning after the debate with the principal of her school.

And while we're on the subject of schools, raise your hand if you think the $1.7 billion tax hike for education, to build new schools and recruit 100,000 new teachers, proposed by the Gore camp is going to improve performance in public schools even one iota.

That number amounts to about six teachers per school district around the country, so don't expect a huge return on your huge investment. Never mind that the responsibility for maintaining a public system of schools is the constitutional right and obligation of the state (see Article X of the U.S. Bill of Rights), not the federal government.

If we really wanted to improve education, we would kill the cow. The federal department of education's monolithic budget contributes a mere 7 percent or so in funding to local schools. It covers somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent of the states' department of education budgets. By killing funding to the big one, you'd inevitably kill funding to the other, and keep tax dollars in the local school districts where, by law and by Constitution, they belong. One of the greatest determinants of public education success, second only to parental involvement, is local control.

Either the American voting public has somehow become enamored by a penchant for lying on the part of their president, or enough is enough. Al Gore may be brilliant, but when his intelligence is used to manipulate the electorate, he is also a brilliant liar. His superior air wrapped around the notion that he knows better what is good for me than I do is off-putting and downright creepy.

That's the biggest of all differences between the Republican and Democratic candidates. George W. Bush believes in self-determination. He wants you to have the freedom to direct your own life. Al Gore wants to reward carefully proscribed behaviors and lifestyles with kudos and services.

Raise your hand if you think Gore's vision for your life is what YOU want for your life.

[Your comments are welcome: ARiley3003@aol.com.]

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