All alone

Ya know, The Oldtimer's been doin' some travellin' round this old country of ours, an' doin' some talkin' with folks in lots of places.

Rich folks, poor folks, crackers, blacks, latinos, orientals, and all kinds of folks.

Democrats, republicans, and even, I suspect, some tea partiers.

People that make jobs and people that have jobs, folks with kids, folks with pets, folks with both, and folks with neither.

You get the idea.

And the overwhelming sentiment that eventually comes to the surface in all these conversations is:

"How come nobody else has to play by the rules?"

Some of the examples from some of those conversations are enlightening:

"There's a guy on TV that says he owed $50,000 on credit cards, and only had to pay $5,000. How come I can't get a deal like that?"

"The ex head of GM ran his company into bankruptcy and needed my tax money to bail it out. Yet he gets paid millions a year, for doing nothing. I don't make that much from my company in a good year."

"The people down the street found they owed more on their house than it's worth, so they stopped paying their mortgage. The bank adjusted their mortgage to the new value and they got a much lower payment. I pay all my bills on time, and my bank won't even talk to me abour a refi, much less an adjustment."

"Congress just rammed a healthcare plan through that I didn't want and that will cost me more money. But it's not good enough for them to have to participate in. Hell, most of the laws they pass, they make sure they don't have to obey."

"I've got relatives in Morrocco who have been trying to get to the US for citizenship for over ten years. Now we're going to give all those who sneaked in over the Mexican border amnesty and let them go to the head of the line? How's that fair?"

Now, folks, I didn't make any of those quotes up.... each and every one is something someone has said to me over the past couple of weeks.

Americans are historically the most charitable and giving people in the world.

This country is where people can get a hand up and a second chance, where charity of our citizens is typically the first and largest at any disaster scene around the world.

Americans are a fair and just people overall.

They understand the concept of fairness, justice, and equal treatment.

And they're not seeing it much anymore.

There's a brushfire smoldering out there, folks.

In some areas it's called immigration, in some jobs, in some Wall Street, in some Congress, but when you cut through the rhetoric, it's about special, unequal treatment and the lack of fair play.

People just want to know what the rules are, and then have everybody be held to them.

They're sick and tired of everybody getting treated as an exception to the rules but them.

And, if they ever realize that all these different groups are actually pissed off about the same thing.... if they ever look below the surface grievances to the root cause, there's gonna be hell to pay.

We Americans are slow to anger, but long on righting inequalities.

And we want and expect people to follow the rules.

Just like most of us have to.


"Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that." ---- Joe Wilson

"Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission." ----
Charles Krauthammer
 
TODAY'S PORK:
$951,500 by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), and House appropriator Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) for downtown Detroit energy efficient street lighting. That’s the least of the city’s problems.