I am going to get a bit personal in this post.
A while back I saw a video of Obama giving a speech. He said very clearly that if you own a company, you didn’t build it. Someone else built it for you. He made it clear that he feels that the benevolence of the government is what builds businesses, and has shown hostility toward the owners of businesses. It is more than that, though. His statement showed a glimpse of who he really is, and what he truly believes.
He is a man who believes that he is an elite who should have the right to make choices for the rest of us. He thinks that he is above the law, and often seems shocked when people, even other politicians, don’t follow him blindly. Based on his actions and attitudes during his presidency, I would have to assume that if he were in a country with fewer checks on his power, he would be a dictator in many ways.
His statement about building businesses angered me, and my resentment against that statement continues. You see, I have built two businesses at different times in my life, and had a lead role in building others. Obama ridiculed the idea that people are successful because the work hard. He seems to think government handouts are better than hard work. I guess many of the companies that received “stimulus” money agreed, since so many took the money and never worked, never built real companies, just spent the money and declared bankruptcy.
I understand a bit about work. I was injured in Iraq. When I returned, I was not able to do the things I was good at anymore. I found myself out of the military, out of money, and basically unemployable in many ways. I started looking for something I could do, and decided that if I were to work, I would have to build myself a job.
No one helped me. There were no government handouts. Companies I expected to be interested in working with me tried to put me out of business to protect their larger customers. We spent years rarely knowing how we would pay for the next meal. We never knew where the money for the mortgage was going to come from. A customer would pay us $50 and my wife would jump in the car and buy something for the kids to eat. I worked from early morning to past midnight most days, apart from the times I could not work. My wife did, too. I learned how it felt when my one-year-old daughter cried for food all day and we had nothing – not a bit of food – in the house. If you’ve been through that, you know what desperation is. I went to get financial advice. I was told my only option was to declare bankruptcy. To me, this was not an option – if I owe someone, I will find a way to pay it. So we kept working, and wondering how we would find the money for our next meal. I will never know how my wife did it, but she did.
Everything we have, everything we have built, we did without assistance from the government. No employees worked for us then – we built nothing on anyone else’s work. I did not use food stamps, or welfare. Everything we bought was with money we earned, and today, as I write this after midnight, after working until three in the morning last night, I can say that nothing but hard work built my company. Oh, and our customers, who have been patient when I missed deadlines because I could not work, sometimes for a day, sometimes for several days in a row. Customers who were willing to trust us back when we were working off of our kitchen table in a tiny house. Some of you who who are reading this now probably never knew what you business meant to us then, when a $50 check from one of you meant we could just survive another week.
Today the company is paying the bills. It isn’t making us rich, but it might someday. If it does, Obama has a clear plan for us – redistribute our wealth. He wants to redistribute wealth because he feels that it is unfair for one person to work hard and to get ahead, while another person does not. So as a true socialist, he believes that those who are willing to work should work to provide for those who are not.
He will take my income and use it to pay for other people’s food, their housing, and even their healthcare. I know what this is like. I lived and worked in a semi-socialist country, where healthcare was free, when it was available. Since availability was limited because socialized healthcare is so financially inefficient, many people died because they could not get adequate treatment. Many people there were paying over a third of their income in taxes to support this system. If my work will help someone else, I should make that choice, not the government. It is not that I am stingy – We give much more to charity voluntarily than we pay in takes every year, and not for any kind of tax advantage, but because we believe in what we are giving to.
I can see the future that Obama wants for our country, and if you are honest, you can too.
Despite all this, I will not be voting for the right candidate. The candidate that I have decided to vote for is not popular with many of my friends. I disagree with him in many areas. But I will still vote for him.
I cannot vote for the right candidate, because the right candidate is not running. No one out there agrees with my political views, values, morals, faith, etc. right down the line. No candidate ever will. Still, in this election, I would have liked to see a better choice than what we have.
Since I cannot vote for the right candidate, I must vote in the right direction.
Politics like many other things in life requires strategy. As conservatives, we are at a disadvantage here. We tend to have strong, even absolute values. We see things in terms of right and wrong. We view the Constitution as the absolute law of the land, and believe in following it to the letter. We know we are right, and we want all or nothing. This means that liberals have the advantage in politics. They tend to be subversive by nature and will give what they have to and take what they can get. They may have an absolute goal of socialism, or complete disarmament of the populace, or government control of industry, things which may sound extreme even to many liberals, but they are willing to take a little bit here and a little bit there. They are willing to advance in stages. They are willing to take less than they wanted to gain a toehold, while we say, “Take it all the way or don’t move at all.”
Some of my friends will be writing in a candidate. Some are refusing to vote. I have heard lots of lofty rhetoric about voting your conscience, and I agree. We need to vote our conscience. We need to make our voice heard. We need to get people into position who will take our country in the right direction. And the place for that is in local elections. It is in primaries. It is in state elections. I live in the state that Sarah Palin is from. How did she end up on the ballot for vice president of the United States? She was elected to the school board in her hometown. She became a mayor. If you are going to be heard, if your vote is going to make great changes, this is where it will happen. What have you done in local politics? What have you done to make sure the right people are elected in your town, borough, county, state? What have you done to influence the Republican or Democrat party? Because it is these things that can determine who will be running for president in the future. It frustrates me to hear people whine about our choice of candidates who did not even bother to vote in the primaries. I know people who talk about voting their conscience who only vote in national elections. This is where real change is made. This is the place for voting your conscience.
But now all that is past. We now have a choice to make. Do we take our toys and go home, or do we make the best of the options we have?
We are in a war for our country. In war, you weigh you options and use the best strategy possible. Sometimes, you can win a great victory. Sometimes, you can hold what you have and wait for reinforcements. Sometimes, all you can do is slow the enemy’s advance to buy time. But you never say, “We can’t win a big victory, so we are going home. Let the enemy take what he wants.”
In this war, there are two possible outcomes. When the polls close tomorrow and the votes are counted, one of two men will be president of the United States. Either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama will win this election. As conservatives, we have a clear choice. Our strategy is obvious. We must elect Mitt Romney, or we will only accelerate on the course that Obama has had us on for the last four years. A vote for any other candidate, or a refusal to vote, is very poor strategy.
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Tags: aviation, business, current-events, economy, election, government, obama, politics, Romney, someone else built that, vote, You didn't build that
