Dear America,
I know you're hurting; the last eight years haven't been our finest. It started way back in 2000 with an election that marked the start of the eight years when we lost our way.
We forgot the personal rights we have championed for so long and environmental progress that could help bolster the economy. Our test scores have dropped and our economy is suffering.
We have lost the ideals our forefathers fought for, bled for and died for while they established this great nation. We have lost our belief in striving to be better and to apply higher principles to our daily life.
While our democracy might make these attempts somewhat flawed, it can still be achieved, considering the government cares about all of us no matter how much we make or what we do professionally.
We allowed our government to convince with fear that we should give up some of our civil liberties to make us feel safer. We allowed the Constitution to disappear as we detained prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without a trial. We let the government have the ability to wire tap phones, allowing the possibility of our government to spy on us.
As a nation, we were led to believe that investing in green technology and stem cell research wasn't needed or that global warming didn't really exist or that new medical procedures would be able to keep growing medical costs down and raise life expectancy in this country. We should be proud that the United Nations has ranked the U.S. life expectancy as 30th in the world.
We have been hearing recently about our school system and how kids test scores are falling. We have become complacent and lazy. We don't encourage reading; we allow our youth to play video games for hours instead of using that time to do homework and study.
Our economy has nose-dived the same way; we decided to live outside our means with credit we didn't earn. We thought we could get away with it as thousands of jobs being shipped over seas without any replacement coming.
But fear not, we can change all of this. We can no longer afford to be watchers in a system that has taken advantage of us. We can take back our rights, voting in leaders who hold sacred the Constitution and the protection of our rights.
We can never allow prisoners to be detained with no hope of a fair trial, making our voices heard that spying on our citizens can not happen.
If we invest in green technology, we can stop sending billions of dollars overseas and begin to supply jobs that are so desperately needed here. We might even be able to stop the polar ice caps from melting.
Other countries will be willing to trade money for this technology to reduce our ever-increasing deficit. With the addition of stem cell research, we can supply the world with cures to diseases never before possible, which would allow Americans to live longer and cut crushing medical costs that can bankrupt families.
Striving for our children to work harder in school and to study more could be vital to restoring America's economic power. It would allow us to send more kids to college and allow them to obtain college degrees in science and engineering to lead us into the 21st century.
It is all within reach, but we can't afford to sit on the bench because no one will make this happen. We must be the engine that drives this change.
If we sacrifice a little and strive to be better, we can make the world better than when we inherited it. If we believe in investing in the common man, we can make the world a better place for our children's children. It starts by taking part in the democratic process.
Don't ever be afraid to fight for what we hold dear. We can recover and once again rise to be the beacon of light for the world.
As Robert F. Kennedy once said, "All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity."
Let us take the dark times and transform them into light.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
