Too early on Saturday

I saw a bumper sticker that said:

I am going to keep my guns, my money, freedom and my God. You can keep the “change”.

Now I think even agnostics can see the problem (main) with this one. Why is God listed last?

If God is in your life you are taught that God should always come first. So guns over God, money over freedom. Anyone wonder why we have such a hard time with values in our country?

And I have a guess, but what exactly is the “change”?

And along those lines I have always struggled when people come up to you and ask for spare change. There is two levels of problems here. And I have to be honest sometimes I do fork out a dollar or some change, but nowhere near to giving every time.

The problems are part of why we need better leadership in our society. The first one is many times these people are border line struggling with being full capacity people. They are homeless, adrift, and forgotten about by most of society. Yet they are humans. We need to do something, but who is responsible? Church and Charities? Our individual graces? I think more because they are human and if their circumstances are such that they cannot function in society without help then all of us as humans need to be prepared to contribute. Does that mean the government should be completely in charge of taking care of them? Actually no. Yet we need to find the solutions that help these people correctly with contributions from all, but not anything that overburdens us. Another words we do not need a nanny state government that over burdens us with taxes and obligations, but leaders who can create a combination of public private partnerships in local communities that find ways to help these people be a part of our society as best as they are able. This is what true leadership means. Finding the right answers and implementing them.

And yes I know there are some programs and institutions that do help. Yet when you look around and yes you do have to look, there are many of these people who are not getting help.

And a quick aside. Mark Cuban posted a very interesting discussion on leadership on his blog. I would recommend it is worth reading.

And second issue is the people who are just homeless due to apathy and laziness or something similar. If they are capable of taking care of themselves then they do need to be held accountable for their own actions. What does held accountable mean? And here again this where we need creative ideas. Leadership that can inspire and implement programs that hopefully would engage people to want to participate in society, but and I mean this at the very least requires them to take care of themselves. The government shouldn’t be responsible for these people and actually that does include arresting them. Putting people who don’t care in jail basically is the government taking care of them.

Finding the solutions to these problems are actually what defines whether a government is doing its job or not. This doesn’t mean the government is the answer, but the driver of the solution. We cannot rely on our government to do everything or tax us to death just to throw money at problems. And especially when many of these programs fail the need. It is the responsibility of government to protect all the people so this means our elected officials need to find these answers. And finding these types of answers are really what defines a country/government as being great. These are not easy solutions.

And this is just one of the many reasons I feel Washington is failing this country and needs a whole new crop of elected officials to take over the reins of leading our country. Okay maybe this particular type of problem should be more addressed at the state and local level, but the need is still the same.


Obviously it was way too early on a Saturday morning not having had breakfast yet running errands to have seen that bumper sticker. Got me ticked off. You know the candy bar commercial, needed something in my belly to make me a better person. Well I have expunged some front porch preaching and hopefully one day soon we can make the changes we need to continue to truly keep our country great.

Have a wonderful day everyone