A WAKE UP CALL

Recently I received an email from a senior citizen who happens to have been a business associate of mine and is now retired in the Atlanta area. He is a widower and remains very active playing trumpet in a Senior Citizens Jazz Band that appears all over the Southeastern States. I do not know the source of the email, but please take a minute to consider the message titled “When Are We Going to Wake Up”.

“Will someone please tell me what the HELL’s wrong with all the people that run this country!!!

We’re ‘broke’ and can’t help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless etc.,???

In the last months we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, and Turkey. And now Pakistan…home of bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!

Our retired seniors living on a ‘fixed income’ receive no aid nor do they get any breaks while our government and religious organizations pour Hundreds of Billions of $$$$’s and Tons of Food to Foreign Countries!

We have hundreds of adoptable children who are shoved aside to make room for the adoption of foreign orphans.

AMERICA: a country where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed hungry, elderly going without ‘needed’ meds, and mentally ill without treatment - etc,etc, YET……..They have a ‘Benefit’ for the people of Haiti on 12 TV stations, ships and planes lining up with food, water, tents, clothes, bedding, doctors and medical supplies.

Imagine if the *GOVERNMENT* gave ‘US’ the same support they give to other countries.

Sad isn’t it?”

What your Commander finds interesting is that more and more people of this great country are suffering in ways that we never experienced in the past and more and more people are speaking up expressing their concerns, which appear to be falling on deaf ears. Tragically, unrest is brewing within the electorate, and that in itself gives me great cause for concern. The people will take just so much and then they will react and it may not always be in rational unemotional ways.

While the subject of escalating food prices is getting growing attention, I believe that one factor must be addressed ASAP, because it is the root cause of the demonstrations and revolutions now rampant across the Middle East. Our government’s stubborn faulty insistence to promote ethanol fuel upon us has caused corn prices to jump to levels that force dramatic increases in all corn-based by-products. If subsidies for ethanol were to stop, the price of corn based products would quickly drop.

And let’s not forget how the price of gasoline affects food prices. Trucks are responsible for delivering all of the produce, meats, dairy products, etc. that fill the grocery and supermarket shelves.

No wonder the natives are becoming increasingly restless, but their growing voices are falling on deaf, self-serving political ears.

COMMANDER GRANGER