Wake up, America

Americans have long been distraught about the growing bureaucracy in which Washington has embellished. With more veins sticking out of our nation’s capital than an elderly lady’s foot, we must take a moment and think is this what we want as Americans?

These ideas of power which have been concentrated in D.C. are not new. Presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon and others knew that the power to control laid in the hands of the executive which could only be done if the power ended its roads in Washington.

Do we really want to be dependent on a sole authority such as the federal government?

Let us first look at dependency. Peggy O’Mara wrote in her book “The Way Back Home” which is based around child dependency that “By assuming that we as parents know what is best for our children in regard to their inner experience, and that we must show them how and when to accomplish basic human developmental tasks, we teach them that outside standards are more important and more accurate indicators than signals from within themselves.”

This is exactly what the federal government has done to the states and its citizens at large. The federal government has fostered their way into our lives slowly from the New Deal to our current regulation found in Obama’s Health Care Reform Bill. They have made it so that the “outside standards” are more important than what we can do locally and inside our own states.

Our country did not begin with the thorns of Washington ripping open the sides of the states. It started with the power concentrated in the government that was the closest to the people: The states. By making the states dependent on the federal government, this has in turn made many citizens dependent on the federal government as well. This is not what is right, this is as far from the meaning of federalism as one could stray and even further from what America is meant to be.

James Madison said “The Constitution of the United States was created by the people of the United States composing the respective states, who alone had the right.” The states created the United States by choice, they have a choice or as Madison says a right to dissolve the United States as well. Is this what it might have to come to in the future?

We as Americans and citizens of our chosen states need to realize that the day is coming when we choose if this is the America we want to live in. Whether having a spoon shoved in our mouths and a simple boring life is the way we want or being given “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is our responsibility to become something that only America can give an individual.

Greatness rest in each of us, the politicians in power today know nothing of what is closest to our hearts and it will soon be our time to correct the wrongs of the past. First we must make a decision that is closest to each one of us and that is whether we want something more than what our federal government can give us?