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From The Nethermost
I will not enter the foray of proclamations saying our government should do this or that. We elect folks to make those decisions. Our Alabama Senators and Representatives have access to details of negotiations that are not available to me, a simple citizen. There are agreements between nations, sects, and businesses that I neither know nor expect to be told. We, the citizens of Clarke County, elected the folks we wanted to know those secret negotiations and to act for us with the information they have. However, as a citizen, I say here as loudly as I can that we should support our troops wherever they are. Mind you, I do not mean support them by only putting a bumper sticker on the pickup truck. I ask for us to do more. In the Feb. 3 edition of the Mobile Press Register, I read that President Bush will ask for $245,000,000,000 to support the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This comes on top of $345,000,000,000 spent for Iraq since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Additionally, the administration asks that we citizens should have new tax cuts and continue the ones already installed. The Mobile Press-Register says that this request for support of our American service men and women amounts to about $800 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. I take it this means that my five grandchildren owe $800 each, too. I regret that. They were all too young to choose this expense. We, their grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunts chose this for them. As I walked through the Nethermost today, I wondered how I could rectify putting this burden on them. What can we, the voting citizens, do to remove from our grandchildren the burden of paying for the choices we have made? As one of our U. S. Presidents was wont to say, let me make this perfectly clear: I started voting at age 18 and during all that time, I have supported our American Forces. I served in the United States Army in the middle '60s, taught mathematics at the United States Military Academy as a visiting professor, and served for years on an advisory panel to that Academy. I applaud the young men and women who choose to serve the nation in the armed forces, and weep with the families for those who are killed and maimed in that service. I say all this not in boastful pride. Rather, I offer that history as proof of my respect for our troops. There is more. I will not recount all that here. Having said that, however, here is my proposal. We need to have a war tax. We are a nation at war. It is time we act like we are a nation at war and take up our part. We need to show our support for the American troops by providing them our financial support. How much, you ask? Whatever it takes, I answer. Pay as we go. I know that there will be those who will stop me in the post office and say that they do not trust the government to spend this new money for supporting the troops. You don't trust our elected officials? Turn them out in the next election! Write Sessions and Shelby and Bonner and Davis. Tell them we will be watching to see that all the war tax goes to support the American troops. If you persist in saying you do not support a war tax for other reasons, maybe you should write those same elected officials and let them know that you can no longer support the War in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe you think our elected officials should get our troops home.
Whatever! It appears that a decision has been made to keep the American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for some longer period. Given that this decision is made, do we not have the moral obligation to write our Congressmen and ask that the federal government raise our taxes? How could we possibly ask our children and grandchildren to pay for this war unless we are willing to do that, too?
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