Janice wrote:I have heard the expression "our nation has created a monster, now can't do anything about it".
I used to think it was welfare. It got out of hand and the government had a hard time with it.
What other monsters do you see that the govenments seems either to have a hard time handling and dealing with that may have gotten out of control now.
We can't afford to have too many monsters without fixing some of them.
I think all of our quasi-wars on abstract ideas have become monsters - the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, etc. All of them start with problems that are extremely complex and incredibly important - things the people of this country should take an interest in taking care of in a way that benefits society. But instead of looking at them from all angles and seriously trying to get down to the root of the problem, it seems like we just toss a sack of money in the governments lap, tell them that we are scared and that we will do what they want, and leave it at that. So the government uses that blank permission slip to spend at will, grow exponentially, wrap every issue imaginable into the "war" and wipe our rights and freedoms out of existence as they see fit .... but once we are at "war" (a silly thing to say anyways, because you can't be at war with an object, a state of being or a thing, anyways, really) people don't care, they just want the "enemy" to go away.
Its too bad we don't approach issues like these more thoughtfully as a nation. There are obviously valid problems that need fixing, but there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. Letting the government throw everything under the sun - from searches without probable cause to fat bloated budgets to one's ability to dissent peacefully - under the umbrella of a quasi-war strikes me as the wrong way.