545 people

The following article is written (in various iterations) by Charley Reese, a former columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. I verified it with Snopes, and a lot of other sources. It's real. This version is the one from 1995.

The 545 People Responsible for all of America's Woes
Written by Charley Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don’t control monetary policy, The Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices - 545 human beings out of the 300 million - are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress.

In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered but private central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority.

They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton-picking thing.

I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall.

No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.

The president can only propose a budget.

He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes.

Who is the speaker of the House?

She is the leader of the majority party.

She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve an y budget they want.

If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts - of incompetence and irresponsibility.

I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.

When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.

If the Marines are in IRAQ, it’s because they want them in IRAQ.

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like ‘the economy,’ ‘inflation’ or ‘politics’ that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses - provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Kant is awesome.

For years, I have been claiming to love the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard. I read his stuff, but seemed to lose the most basic ideas in the philosophy. I first read the philosophers in college and found one in particular whom I identified with the most. However, it wasn't Kierkegaard. And now I realize that I made a mistake. The philosopher I fell in love with in college was one Immanuel Kant.
In honor of him, I give you the following quotes.

“Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”

“Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.”

“If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.”

“Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”

“It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.”

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”

“Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.”

“Do what is right, though the world may perish”

“So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.”

“The death of dogma is the birth of morality”

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

“Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.”

“By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man”

“In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.”

“The possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason”

“Perpetual Peace is only found in the graveyard”

“To be is to do.”

“It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.”

“Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.”

“All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?”

“Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild”

“Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.”

Unfriend

So, on the social networking addiction popularly known as Facebook, I have over 250 friends. Most are people I knew cursorily in college or high school, some that I've met only once but communicate with, and others that I know from my vast and varied travels.

Honestly, I can't keep track of that many people. Just like people that pass you in the hall, sometimes you don't notice if one is gone for a bit. Eventually you think about the person and you realize, "Hey, I haven't seen her in a while. I wonder how she's doing."

And then there are the people that you are more closely connected with. The ones whose absence immediately affects you. You may not notice for a day or two. But eventually you do, and then you wonder what happened.

As you may have guessed, Someone unfriended me this week. Usually when someone unfriends me, I notice the number of friends has gone down and I briefly look through my list, but can't figure out who it was. The rejection stings a little bit, but I figure whoever it was, we probably hadn't talked in a while, and it's not so great a loss.

But this Someone... I noticed almost immediately. I noticed because every day waking up and facing his rejection three months and twenty-three days ago is a weight on my heart. Like a long drag on a cigarette, each breath drags at my heart and burns a little more away. I noticed because after the drama of "The Phone Call" thirteen days ago, which resulted in a strongly-worded email from me, explaining how we are NOT friends and Someone has NO business asking me how I'm doing after essentially telling me that he didn't really care about me anymore.

Someone then didn't email me back apologizing for breaking my heart. Someone didn't call me again (after all, I asked him not to). Someone just unfriended me.

Now to be fair I have to say that I did pretty much restrict all his Facebook access to me after he was kind of a jerk to some of my friends on my wall. But I didn't unfriend him. I thought about it, but I didn't.

Now that he's pulled the plug and clicked that button, I feel more rejected than ever. And I need Jesus more than ever.

The Road to Hell

I've started going to The Flood, and I really enjoy it. One of my favorite things is the imagery that they use. the current series is called "Ten Thousand Years: Ancient Stories of Amazing Grace" and the image they've chosen to represent that is the Bristlecone pine tree. It looks something like this:

Bristlecones are the oldest living things on earth. They're thick, hardy, and gnarly. Like Grace.

Today's sermon told the tale of Cain and Abel, but approached the story from a different angle. The pastor read the verse where God tells Cain, "Sin is crouching at your door..." Matt likened this to a predator lying in wait for the prey to come along. and then he asked us, "What is your crouching sin?"

He warned us that it's probably not the sin you think of immediately. It's probably way subtler. More rationalized. 

And then he began giving examples: 

-"I'm not bitter towards men. I'm just hurt and I'm trying to make wise decisions for the future."

-"I'm not a workaholic. I'm just trying to provide for my family, and make more money so I can help others."

-"I'm not stingy with my money. I'm just trying to be a good steward of what God has given me."

-"I'm not obsessed with the way I look. I'm just trying to make healthy choices for my life."

All those things sound really good. And even your motivations sound okay. But as Matt listed them off, I felt knives dive and twist in my chest. Each point was another notch- another cut. It hurt, because I do this.

I rationalize my sin.

See, these things sound okay because I'm giving great excuses for them. But the focus in each case is still on me, not on God. Cain's sin was self-pity and rationalizing.

My sin is no different.

But God's infinite grace is great!

Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace,
Freely bestowed on all who believe!
You that are longing to see His face,
Will you this moment His grace receive?

Beauty the Villain

(A brief Aside: in the course of this article, I express ideas which I don't actually believe simply to make a point. It's called satire. Please don't send me hate mail for being an evolutionist. I am, in fact, not. In addition, I'm aware that I oversimplify a few matters here, but it's necessary. Trust me-- I didn't want to write a dissertation today!)

A few days ago, I was discussing with a friend the idea that beauty could not have evolved, or that it would offer little reproductive advantage in the grand scheme of natural selection. Birds sing. They sing as a mating call. But there's no reason why a female bird should find a male's song pleasing. There is no gene, as far as we know, for preferences.

Likewise, there's no reason that a peahen should be pleased by the bright and daunting plumage of a peacock, nor is there any reasonable explanation of how having said plumage makes the male a better reproductive choice than anyone else.

There are beautiful mollusks that live at the bottom of the ocean. They have no eyes, and they can't perceive their breathtaking colors. The colors give them no special adaptations over their less attractive counterparts. And in our day-to-day adventures, we never would encounter them, so they give no advantage to anyone else.

Moreover, the ones which live within grasp of humans, you would expect, would evolve to be less attractive, since that gives them the advantage of being left alone on the beach, and not picked up and taken home, where they wither and die.

Attractiveness to the eye stimulates chemicals in the brain which are associated with the reproductive hormones. We know this. But consider this example: researchers discovered about five years ago that in male fruit bats, the size of the gonads is inversely proportional to the size of the brain. Interestingly, this gave reproductive advantage to both categories of males. Some females were attracted to the size, and they chose the males whose reproductive capacity was more obvious. The males with larger brains, however, were often able to “charm” females into mating with them. So the females who were less shallow, if you will, chose males who were more intelligent, giving their offspring a higher chance of propagating said brainpower, while the females who selected well-endowed males gave their own offspring larger reproductive organs. This polarization of traits means that mediocre males with neither larger testes nor larger brain are selected out of the population!

How all this affects us is a bit less obvious, but important nonetheless.

Imagine, for a moment, a lovely caveman community. It's spring, as we know, in the spring a young caveman's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love (1). Now without useful language, only minor grunts, a caveman (We'll call him Og) is not able to express his affection for a certain lovely cavewoman (aptly named Gra). Now, he has two choices: either take her by force as his wife, or convince her to come willingly. What's to stop Gra from choosing Gron, the strongest caveman in town, as her mate? Not to mention, Gron has a reputation of taking whomever he wants, and no one can stand up to him. Poor Og! Will he ever find love?

One day, as he is walking along the sandy shore, Og finds a round rock-looking object. It has a pretty flower design on it, and is quite nice looking. He thinks Gra will like it, so he takes it and gives it to her. Something important has just happened! Og has given the first gift! And now, Gra has a sentimental attachment to the sand dollar and, by proxy, to Og!

Later, Og finds a flat piece of bark. He smears some flower color on it, and again gifts it to Gra. First piece of art!

We now have a reproductive reason for art to exist.

But there's a major problem.

Let's fast-forward several thousand years. We've seen art develop from conjugal gifts. Probably first it was used to secure mates. As time went on, trade began to flourish, and art was no exception. Someone figured out that he could make the art and trade it for goods and services: the first professional artist! (the first corporate sellout as well?)

Cave drawings became a way to communicate, as well as decoration. Rocks were scarred with designs. Paints developed. Stories were told. Suddenly beauty was a commodity and it bled into everything: household tools had to be attractive. Precious stones developed value. And the human body became an expression of art as well when we mixed needles with ink.

Swords were embellished, breastplates stamped with images. Clothing became colorful. And in the Renaissance, our view of beauty developed even more. The early naturalists turned back to nature and smiled on it. They began to paint serene landscapes. Over the next five hundred years, our opinions on beauty were refined. Earth is beautiful. We established National Parks and Reserves to preserve that beauty.

But somewhere along the way, beauty turned against us.

As we discovered more of the world, we began to appreciate nature far above humanity. When we told the story of Earth, we cast ourselves as the villain, the invader, the rapist arriving on the scene and violently destroying what is pure and beautiful when left alone. In the words of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "What's so great about discovery? It is a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world."

As such we vilified the human race, to the point where we are now blaming and berating ourselves for the very climate changes which seem historically to favor evolution, especially speciation, AND which have yet to prove their detriment.

So in the past century or so, our perception of beauty has created a situation where in favor of preserving the beauty of the Earth, we are almost willing to destroy ourselves.  Beauty has saved us, and condemned us. Beauty has become a villain, seeking to annihilate the human race rather than see Earth overdeveloped and species destroyed because of our selfish needs.

But I have one question:

When we are gone from Earth, who will be there to appreciate its breathtaking beauty?

Let's Get the Men Back

Dockers just started this awesome ad campaign calling on men to "wear the pants" again. To man up, if you will. While I'm perfectly happy being single (yes! finally!), I do appreciate a good strong man who knows how to treat people. So, in support of Dockers, I'm calling all men.

America: A World Traveler's Review

Today is the first anniversary of my return from my 20-month stay in Kenya. It was a formative time in my life, and it undoubtedly changed my worldview fundamentally.

But coming back to the US was much harder than going to Kenya in the first place. I said this today to a friend, and didn't realize the truth of it until I heard it from my own lips.

See, when you're going to another country you expect everything to be different. When I first went to Kenya I expected nothing to be the same as it was back home, and it greatly eased my transition there. Not to say that my life was easy in Kenya. Oh, no, the culture shock came much later when I dealt with deep root issues, rather than the surface customs and language issues.

But none of this compares to the reverse culture shock... the shock of returning. The shock of coming home, and finding that it's no longer home.

Has America changed? Yes. But I have changed more. I am less patient with our cultural obsession with the little things, and I want always to find the bottom line. I've ceased to care about our minor theological disagreements, and strive to see the Gospel preached and lived out in the lives of Christians. I've found that so many aspects of my life before no longer matter. I do not try to maintain thin, shallow, meaningless acquaintances. I strive to develop deep, accountable relationships where we foster the love of Christ deeply in each other's lives.

US culture seems to revolve around maintaining a cloud of shallow relationships, which we can then use or ignore as we see fit. Our individualism cripples us from real community or accountability, and prevents us from being truly honest with each other.

In the film "Anchorman" (which you probably shouldn't see, but which I was forced to, because it's based in my hometown, San Diego), the main character at one point says to a woman, "I don't know how to put this, but I'm kind of a big deal." How poignantly this illustrates what I've come to see at the REAL, the foundational American dream. The reason we desire a decent job and a family with 2.4 kids, a nice car, and a house with a white picket fence is that it communicates to the people around us that we are "kind of a big deal". It tells them that we've achieved success, and that for this reason we deserve their respect.

The American Dream is simply a cry for attention-- a deep-seated desire to matter to someone. What we're really saying is, "Pay attention to me! I'm valuable as an individual!"

We've lost grasp of our identity because we've become so individualized. Fix your own problems. Deal with your own issues. Support yourself. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Don't depend on anyone. Don't ask for help. Don't whine about your troubles.

But this is not the Gospel in Scripture. This is not the way of the followers of Jesus. We are called to be One Church, not a church of ones. To be interdependent, not independent. But all the people I meet, Christians especially, feel so utterly alone.

And when we are alone, we cannot be a church.

So, as I recover from returning to the US, and from the breakup that left me wondering if I'll always be alone in a romantic sense, I realize that the loneliness in my life has nothing to do with romantic company. It has everything to do with the lack of people with whom I can be real, be honest, be accountable.

God has provided me with several close friends with whom I can be real, and who do value me.

To you friends: Deanne, Andrea, Brad, Dave S, Ben, Daniel, and Sharee, thank you for being there.

I encourage you who read this to seek out Godly friends as well, because it is only together that we can be the living, functioning Body of Christ.