Can’t Go On Like This

By Tom McLaughlin

Something’s in the air – a foreboding. People sense it, and when I ask them to describe it they bite their lips, look away and look back to say something like, “I don’t know. It just can’t keep going on like this. Something’s going to break.” Some think another financial meltdown is coming, but a bigger one, much bigger. Others think it will manifest as a breakdown of law and order. No one I’ve talked to thinks their lives or their children’s lives are going to improve in the foreseeable future. They think about just holding on. They see decline all around them and are bracing for more. They expect the slide to accelerate.

Quite A Fix

“If it ain't broke, don’t fix it,” is a Yankee proverb.

“If it ain't broke, keep fixing it ’til it is broke,” is a government proverb.

A hundred years ago, the federal government “fixed” the mouth of the Saco River in Maine by building a jetty. They started the project around 1825 when textile mills a little upstream were thriving. The idea was to deepen the river channel and allow ships to travel up to the mills. By the time the Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) finished nearly a century later, the mills had begun their decline. As the Portland Press Herald reports: “‘All this made the jetty seem like a good idea at the time,’ said Patrick Fox, director of Saco’s Public Works Department. But the jetty no longer seems to be the solution it once represented; in fact, it has become a very expensive and controversial problem.”

Declaration Of Dependence

By Tom McLaughlin 

How many of us still “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”?

Academia as Humpty Dumpty

How can so many college kids afford to party during spring break? Plane tickets, hotel rooms, alcohol, food, marijuana, all cost a lot of money. Do their parents pay for it? Do they use their government Pell Grants? Their taxpayer-subsidized loans? And where do they get the time? Don’t they have to study? Don’t they have to write papers? Don’t they have work-study

Talk Is Cheap

 

Things ordinary people learn growing up in the neighborhood help to understand international relations. It's obvious now that President Obama was bluffing when he warned Syria not to use chemical weapons, and the world knows it too. Syria called his bluff - crossed his red line. As the late Margaret Thatcher would put it - the president is going wobbly - and in doing so, making the world more dangerous. It would have been better if he'd kept his mouth shut, but talking is all he knows how to do.