It's Time to Wake Up

Sooner or later you are going to have to wake up from the happy little trance you call "life" and realize that the indiscernible stench emanating from parts unknown, might just be coming from underneath your own deck. You’ve blamed it on the neighbors for too long. It’s understandable; no one wants to think that it might be them the rest of the neighborhood is talking about. But they all smell it too and unless someone does something about it before the summer weather hits, it’s only going to fester.

Then on one particularly torrid July afternoon, just after one of the toughest sales meetings of your career, you are going to come home from work, park the Audi in the driveway, walk back to turn on the sprinklers and find that the neighbor’s dog has been digging in your yard, trying to get under the deck.

You’ve put it off for far too long now and you have to fix it. The neighbors are complaining, the kids won’t play out back any more and your parents won’t sit out on the back deck with you when they visit. Those brutally hot days are the worst too! On days like that, you don’t even want to think of being outside, let alone pulling up deck boards. But then the flies start swarming and you are forced to admit the stench is definitely coming from underneath your deck.

Buzzards have been circling your house for the better part of ten days now and the delusion that this is someone else’s problem is long gone. You are going to have to man-up, put on your shorts and flip flops and start crawling around on the broiling deck boards trying to find the screw heads. You are going to have to face the ugliness hiding just feet away.

A few days later, the carcass has been removed and you can once again smell the flowers and freshly mown lawns. Life is good and as you reflect on the ordeal, you realize that the hardest part was simply realizing that the smell was coming from your back yard, and not someone else's.

Such is life. The hardest part is recognizing and then admitting that we have problems, especially if it’s a problem shared by a lot of people. It’s a lot like farting in an elevator, everyone knows that someone farted, but no one ever fesses up. There’s a principle known in psychological parlance as “diffusion of responsibility” and in short it means that the more people that share a responsibility, the less likely it will be that anyone will take action on it.

Diffusion of responsibility is what happens when people come up on an accident on freeway and think “there are a lot of people out here, I’m sure someone will call for help” as they drive on past. But they underestimate the power of numbers and fail to understand that most people will think exactly the same thing: “Somebody else will call.” As a result, help arrives too late to save the accident victim - if at all.

I’m here to tell you that you have to step up to the plate. We all have to step up to the plate at the same time and in one singularly united voice scream: Enough! The gypsies have been running the castle for too long and it’s time for them all to go. Lets drop the cutesy little metaphors and similes and put the cards out on the table, shall we. The United States has been hijacked by crooked bastards who only care about themselves and making their own families, cronies and partners rich as the rest of us starve to death.

You might be one of the still groggy ones who will laugh this notion off, “everything is fine” you tell yourself. Well, this is the wake up call…Things are not fine! The crooks have played their parts well, They want us to keep thinking that everything is hunky dory while they are robbing us blind and the civil rights that every American has taken pride in for the past two hundred years are being stripped and eroded.

Many of the people we have elected to run our government for us as we attempt to manage our every day lives (Federal, State and Local) have become crooked. There are many reasons for this but the primary reason seems to be that we have not held any of them accountable. Secondarily, our two party system has us all more divided than ever before in our history, think it's a coincidence? Think again! Divide and Conquer...Sun Tsu...The Art of War....written thousands of years ago...These sorts of tactics aren't just for the battle field any more.

When we are not too busy talking about Celebrity Rehab, American Idol or Britney Spears, we see stories of corruption and scandal on the news almost daily. This blog isn't about politics people. I don’t care about democrat or republican, socialist or fascist, red state or blue state, I’m here to give you the bad news: They are all against us!