YES…WE CAN STILL CELEBRATE THE FOURTH OF JULY
(…despite the best efforts of Congress not to give us any reasons to do so…)

As usual on the occasion of Independence Day we go all out for it, with great pomp and circumstance and enthusiasm. Yes…we can still celebrate the Fourth of July…despite the best efforts of this Congress not to give us any reasons to do so.

We’ve watched a lot of congressional performances in our time, most of them ending with respectable batting averages, but this current one is perhaps one of the most obstructive and least productive one we have yet seen. The only “business” they seem to have had any interest in doing, rather than the People’s, has been their own partisan interests.

It’s been that way since 2008 with tit-for-tat political wrangles and useless efforts to try and out-maneuver their political rivals anyway they could. One side of the aisle determined not to help legislate anything regardless how necessary it might be, just because it doesn’t like the current occupant of the White House. The other side, just as determined to ram its agendas down everyone’s throats…whether they liked them or not.

Meanwhile, our budgetary and financial house remains in disorder (and they wonder why the economy stays so tepid…duh!), our immigration system urgently needs to be reformed and rationalized to meet our 21^st Century conditions, Homeland Security dingoes play fast and loose with the Constitution in the interests of “national security”, and several Secretaries of State have raced around the world trying to shore up America’s position and prestige in it…with about as much success as frantic high school principals attempting to scold everyone else’s student bodies about their misbehaviors…an idiotic example of a black pot calling other folks’ kettles…black.

Still, it’s our Fourth of July, so we might as well indulge our pride in our nation because, despite all its flaws, it has managed to survive since its founding 238 years ago…no matter how many times we have come close to blowing it apart…yet…we’re still here… somewhat dinged and banged up…and not quite the bright penny we used to think we were…but still a going concern.

So perhaps it’s time we take advantage of the occasion to take a long hard look at what we’ve become, to think about how far we’ve strayed from our Constitutional foundations, and admit to the fact that the fault for all of these things lies squarely on our shoulders as taxpaying voters of this land. All because we have allowed ourselves to become a nation of sheep…re-electing self-serving career politicos term after term after term…after term.

There are those who’ve become so dependent on this state of affairs that they cry in alarm at the slightest suggestion that we need to change the way things are, if we hope to see us last another couple of hundred years. And the only way we can do that is by mounting a Second American Revolution, not by the bullet, as with so many others, but by the ballot…to break up the duopoly now entrenched as our Democratic and Republican parties. For that to happen each and every one of us taxpaying voters needs to abandon blind adherence to those parties, to re-register ourselves as true –Independents – and vote not on the basis of party, but on the basis of issues, and the day we abandon these two now useless political machines…that will be the day we’ll start rebuilding America the Beautiful…again.

If we don’t…we’ll deserve everything we won’t get.

Merry Firecrackers…y’all!

CENTURION