After the first Rocky movie hit the theaters, one of my clinical psych teachers commented about how good it can actually be to come in second. This is not the way people of any nationality want to feel. Everyone has been primed to be number one and nothing else will do.
There is a movement afoot for the United States to be number one in worldwide rescue missions. We just absolutely cannot let anyone else hold first place in anything. We must be the leaders. That's the competitive spirit! That's the way it is praised. Be first everywhere -- in sports, in education, in wealth, in war, in space, in rescue missions and even in meddling. Number two will not do even in looking the fool to the world. Ask any country that sticks it's hands out to take our dollars or our help while turning to their neighbors to "LMAO".
Joe Klein, a columnist in Time, stated in the July 28, 2004, issue that President Barack Obama needs to step up and address the worlds problems, especially the Central American "refugees" at our Southern borders and, "well, lead". President Barack Obama said in a speech the end of last week that the United States needs to take the lead in "this", referring to problems in the Ukraine.
Rebel Russian sympathizers and/or Russian troops are blowing commercial airliners out of the sky now. It wasn't enough to just kill each other on the ground.
Hamas and Israel are at it again. Egypt and John Kerry, our Secretary of State, have tried to negotiate a cease fire. Hamas keeps lobbing missiles. Israel keeps lobbing back. War has escalated to boots on the ground in the Gaza Strip and Netanyahu says he knows what Israel needs.
Afghanistan holds a vote and then the loser yells for a recount. The western world supervises a recount.
Egypt took giant steps forward and then giant steps back. Syria, a situation never solved, has lost the number one space in the headlines. Yemen, too.
A few dozen stolen girls escaped their captors. Then, this tragedy took a back seat to more "pressing matters". Where are the rest of the girls?
Let's face it, our southern border concerns are just about as insoluble as the concerns between Palestine, Hamas and Israel, the various branches of Islam, or Islam and the rest of the religions of the world. But there we are in the middle of everywhere borrowing money and passing it out to save everybody but ourselves.
Are you parents? At home, what would you do if your infant daughter were crying from hunger and the need to be changed at the same time your constantly squabbling twin two year old boys were at it again, and your six year old needed help with his/her homework and your eight year old started saying he needed a ride to soccer practice?
Well, first you would prioritize . Which is the most serious problem? Which child is the most helpless? How can one parent split herself all those ways? You can't, so you delegate.
You would yell for Dad to separate the twins. You would have the soccer player help his/her younger sibling with the homework and you would feed and change the baby yourself. If you were really smart you would get the Dad to pack all the older children into the car and take the soccer player to practice. Hence, the chaos is eliminated so that you can feed and bond with the infant.
So what does our President do? He tries to negotiate with Putin, the Ukraine, and the out of control rebels while sending Secretary of State Kerry to Israel, while petitioning the Congress of no so he can get enough dollars to actually do something about the border, while not giving many sound bytes to the temporarily simmering countries of the rest of the Middle East. He lets other world leaders help supervise election squabbles and sift through the plane disaster zone, while trying to armor himself against the constant attacks from the Republicans, Democrats, Tea Partiers, Congress, the Supreme Court and every other organization at home and abroad who thinks they can do it better even if they don't have the intelligence facts and contacts to know what exactly "it" is. Do the run on sentences leave you as out of breath as the President must be feeling all the time? Good!
Then, God forbid, he stops amidst all this chaos for a game of pool, a game of pickup, or a dinner out with his wife and he comes under even more attack by people who wouldn't consider doing without their own version of R and R. Do they understand the research findings about planned rests refreshing and energizing us to produce more?
Really, people, the job is hard enough on a good day without special interest groups or individuals and the press deciding just what the priorities are and who should deal with which. Much less, does the Chief Executive need the interference of prevaricators, foot draggers, and blustering of the other parties.
And really, Mr. Klein, you are blaming the Tea Party and citing Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge about the border uprising? I'm a veritable bleeding heart liberal Democrat and I, too, am saying "enough is enough", send most of them back. Let them go south of their country. Let them go anywhere else. We're broke and operating on overload.
The United States of America is not the Savior of the World. We are financially unfit to lift the world from poverty. We are in a pre-divorce setting with parties at odds and states threatening secession. It is time for us to quit forcing ourselves and our ideas on the rest of the world. We need to spend our own dollars on ourselves and our national debt. We need to regroup, rethink, reorganize, prioritize and delegate responsibility. And, if in the process of fixing ourselves first, we become second best in world politics, so be it. Let us do it with the grace and dignity with which it was handled by the Greeks, the Holy Roman Empire and the United Kingdom. And let our President get some rest.
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