dog-gone-right.com Blog

The attached coulumn is by Culpeper Star Exponent Columnist James Bayne IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING…

These are the beginning words from a quote attributable to Yogi Berra. The complete quotation is: “If you don’t know where you are going; you might wind up some place else”.

As we, as individuals and our nation as a whole, set out on this New Year it will behoove us to know where we are going. The last few years have seen a culmination of failure on the national level “to know where we were going” which has resulted in a protracted military undertaking in the middle east; massive losses in national manufacturing strength; transfer of large numbers of jobs to overseas locations; ruinous unemployment levels across the employment spectrum; and rampant avarice and greed in the upper echelons of banking and insurance industries who took advantage of the failure by the Federal Reserve Board to know where its actions were leading; are among those areas which affect the citizenry. It is my belief that each of these missteps occurred because we did not know where we were going.

While we tend to place the blame for failure of a national program or mission with the President in office at the time it is, in truth, not just the President but also those in his cabinet and the Members of Congress who share the blame. They must develop clear sustainable programs on “where we are going” and partisanship ideologies must be set aside for the good of the Nation in order that we do not wind up some place else. While I do not pretend to understand the contents of the proposed health care reform before the Congress, it seems to me that they are bound and determined to enact something that approximately 60% of the public does not want.

This seems to be a continuation of the types of errors made in the past such as the misapplication of our military forces in involvement in the internal affairs of other nations; covert operations (including abetting coups) in some nations; and internally we have been, and are, pursuing courses of action which threaten the long term stability of the nation. I understand that the debt limit for the Nation has recently been raised to $12.4 trillion and that increase immediately triggered new plans for further expenditures on programs which may have little, if any, sustainable long term benefit for the nation.

I will cite just one current example of not knowing where we are going and that is the recent airliner bomb threat at Detroit. Involved in this failure to detect are the National Security Agency; the CIA; the National Counterterrorism Center; the State Department; the Homeland Security Agency; the FBI Terrorist Screening Center and probably other agencies of which I am not aware. Might it be that we have too many cooks stirring the pot (and none with the recipe knowing where we are going)?

May you and yours have a most happy and prosperous New Year.