America’s priorities for the next fifty years will have much to do with everything

Think upper classes, middle classes, and lower classes. Think enemies, foreign and domestic. Think local vs. state vs. federal. Even think affordability vs. desirability when prioritizing, assuming we can’t have it all when we want it.

America has had an idealistic and well-intended love affair with the lower classes during the last fifty years. Many efforts and dollars have been devoted to helping this group along, to include such venerable institutions as the Catholic churches and their schools. America has had a fifty year effort to promote federalism as a well-intended effort to make one size fit all, and to make us “one” country. The interstate highway system is a good example. The Cold War and the onset of the nuclear age set policies, laws, and budgets for fifty years that made sense when applied by those devising such things. Earlier more local accomplishments like clean water, waste water treatment, public electricity, levees, and basic health like malaria control and vaccinations, paled in comparison during the last fifty years, being already done deals. Last, America’s historical personality that tends towards isolationism and pacifisms reasserted itself, again.

We Americans are never stuck in the past, though some of our people and politicians may be. The status quo can have a bad connotation. “For lack of knowing what to do, we do what we know” is a limiter to future priorities. And time does move on and drive things, thank goodness. For an example's sake, a circa 1908 problem about what to do with all the animal waste resulting from transportation in cities was a big health and political deal. Now we have other problems.

In the present election cycle of 2008, and the immediate ones in 2010 and 2012, one can use perspective in deciding their votes, local, state, and federal. For example, one scheme should give priority to promoting, protecting, and growing our middle classes, as opposed to the lower classes as a priority. The same scheme should protect and promote all the local things that may have become politically boring. For sure control of local schools and curriculums should return to the parents to include enhancing their responsibilities as parents of school age children. Out of wedlock births should be ostracized for what they are, irresponsible sexually promiscuous behavior, to include unsafe sex given the terrible SDT numbers today. The same future scheme should recognize and reward integrity and honesty as good guides in how to run and promote a society. Political tactics and parsed words and pandered budget gimmicks all too often work in the short term, while the long term society suffers or demands even more band aids on top of earlier band aids.

The list can go on, but the point is that America is never stuck in the past, and the last fifty years of past should be no bind on our next fifty year future. Absent the present volunteer candidates for federal president even mentioning this type of discussion, and the present system still promotes this silliness (locally, state, and federal), then it is time to find, promote, and protect, other candidates that give more emphasis to devising and leading to our National future, and not our past.