A Presidential Debate

I’ve never used my blog as a political forum.  You’ve probably been able to ascertain that freedom of speech is almost as important to me as frozen yogurt, but the only “party politics” I ever engage in on here have been along the lines of “I’m having a football party and you’re only invited if you’ll cheer for the Giants.”

But it’s hard to avoid political conversations with a Presidential election rapidly approaching.  I won’t go into all of my personal politics and defenses of them here.  I just want to make a couple of quick remarks regarding this election and then I’ll take three to five pre-approved questions from the audience that my team of writers has prepared answers for.

Number one, I am so sick of Mitt Romney being criticized for his wealth.  Why does the media keep insisting he isn’t qualified to be President because he’s too successful and out of touch with “normal” citizens?  They are essentially implying we should elect some minimum-wage earning, modestly educated, underinsured laborer to our highest office just because that person could understand us better.  Really?  Then they should nominate the assistant manager of my local Harris Teeter to be President of the United States of America.

It’s ridiculous.  Why wouldn’t we want someone who knows how to grow a business and amass a fortune?  He’s good with money and our economy is broken, seems like a good fit to me.  And you don’t have to experience unemployment to help find a solution for it.  Jonas Salk cured polio even though he’d never had it himself. 

And even if Romney didn’t care about low-income families out of a spirit of humanity or moral obligation as a leader, he would still want to improve their circumstances because it’s guys like him (multi-millionaires) who are giving up nearly 50% of their income to support the government assistance programs that sustain (and at times coddle) these citizens. 

And, yes, Romney will give rich people a tax break, because he sees the injustice of punishing people for their success.  But even with tax cuts, wealthy Americans will contribute way more to the federal budget than the rest of us.  As it should be.  If Kobe Bryant paid 15% of his annual income in taxes and I paid 15% of my annual income in taxes, he’d be giving about 4.2 million and I’d toss in another twelve dollars.  That seems fair.

Number two, I don’t want to hear Barack Obama and his peeps telling us he needs more time to make that change he promised four years ago.  Four years is a LONG time.  Maybe not long enough to fix everything, but certainly long enough to fix some things.  Four years should be enough time to instill confidence in your nation that you are definitely the right man for the job. 

This isn’t about what Obama did or didn’t do.  It isn’t even necessarily a remark on this election and Presidency.  I just think that politicians can’t ask for more time to do what they said they’d do.  The length of a Presidential term was chosen because that’s long enough to make a positive impact on our country, long enough to achieve your goals if you’re capable of achieving them.  And if you do a great job, there is the option (not right) of doing it again.  A second term is meant for repeating successes, not still trying to accomplish the first ones.

And even if a President is phenomenal and we wanted to elect him a third time, we can’t.  Because the framers of our constitution realized that our country can and will benefit from changes in leadership, from fresh ideas and perspectives.

I don’t agree with everything that Mitt Romney has said and done in his life.  And I don’t agree with everything Barack Obama has said and done in his life either.  Honestly, I don’t agree with about half of what I’ve said and done in my own life.  But I’ve seen how effective Barack Obama is as our President and I’m not very impressed. 

If this was football, and oh how I wish it were, and our team had a man at quarterback for four years and we hadn’t won very many games, wouldn’t we put in a replacement quarterback?  Maybe we didn’t even have a losing record, but we failed to make the playoffs for four consecutive years and our fans were disheartened.  We’d try out someone new at quarterback, right?  We’d probably sign some new wide receivers and safeties in the off-season too.  It would come down to who on our roster impresses us and where was there room for improvement.

But one thing’s for sure, I wouldn’t discount a potential quarterback because he had only played in Super Bowl games and never thrown a regular season pass.  Or because he didn’t know what it was like to be an offensive lineman.  It’s not his job to be an offensive lineman.  Obviously any quarterback would want his offensive line to be successful, because his success is dependent on their success, just as a President’s success is dependent on the success of American citizens. 

A quarterback understands and appreciates the role that the offensive line plays in winning a game even if he’s never been on that line himself, just like Mitt Romney can understand the need for a strong middle class and the plight of low-income families despite having never been in those positions. 

I’m sure there are legitimate arguments for why neither of these men should be President, but Mitt Romney being wealthy and successful isn’t one of them.

Lost In Translation

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to come to terms with what things about me I can change and what I can’t. I was horribly out of shape for most of my twenties, but by my thirtieth birthday, I’d changed that. I not only adapted to a new healthy lifestyle, but I actually became addicted to it.

I’ve also made progress with computers and technology. Granted I’m still the most tech-inept person I know, but believe me I was way worse five years ago. I’m better with money and time management; my Valentine’s gift to my husband is that I’m sticking to our budget like glue. That may not sound romantic, but to him it’s like I hung the moon.

But some things I’m starting to realize are just part of who I am, and always will be. One is that I’m navigationally challenged to the point of it being a physical handicap. I could maybe…MAYBE, find north if I had a compass. Even then….?

Unless I’ve been somewhere at least seven or eight times, there’s a good chance I can’t find it. It doesn’t help to tell me where it is in location to somewhere else, because odds are, I don’t remember where that place, street, store is either. It especially doesn’t work if someone says that my destination is just south of…or west of… x, y, or z….because again, I don’t know those.

And don’t give me that whole the sun rises in the east and sets in the west crap because I’m never going anywhere at seven a.m. on a cloudless day. NEVER! And even if I determine east and west “from the sun”, I don’t know if I’m facing north or south in relation to it!

Last week, I went with the girls on a field trip to the children’s museum downtown. I’ve been downtown maybe a dozen times in the seven years we’ve lived in Raleigh, and was probably only driving on three of those occasions. So, I knew going into it that I should pay attention, i.e. don’t get caught up singing along to the radio at the top of my lungs or talk on my cell phone as I guessed my way through one way streets.

I did okay finding the museum, but then got completely turned around three hours later when I came out of the parking lot. I needed to return to the preschool to reclaim my girls, because they were riding back there on the bus, a wise choice given their mother’s total lack of an internal gps.

A few minutes after I left, I realized I’d probably never see the girls again. I made a literal and figurative wrong turn because I was headed into a part of town that was not ever going to end in a preschool.

I tried to call my husband, but he has this serious full-time job thing that often results in him being unavailable to act as On-star. So, next I called my friend J, who is a very navigationally capable woman. A woman who has lived here longer than me and confidently learned her way around downtown Raleigh.

Thank God she was home because if I didn’t get on the right track really soon, I was going to earn a starring role on a 48 Hours mystery. My choices would be to embrace a life of crime, possibly through being jumped into a gang, or to become statistic and headline of the six o’clock news.

My friend helped me and I escaped back to the suburbs, but, for the record, I’ve always understood why Hansel & Gretel needed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way home. I feel like I need to do that when I go out to get a jug of milk.

The other thing that I’ve been totally unsuccessful in changing about myself is my propensity for saying exactly what’s on my mind, the very instant I think it.

Case in point: this Sunday, in our Sunday school class, we were listening to a really great lesson that was both uplifting and challenging. Near the end of the discussion, the teacher used a football analogy, as an example of how people recall the same event with different details, like how the apostles recount Jesus’ time on earth with slight variations. Variations, not contradictions…it’s just that some of the things they saw him do stood out more to some of them than others.

Anyway, the analogy started like this, “Remember that sideline catch that the Giants had in the second half of the Super Bowl?” There were lots of nods, and, at the same time, everyone’s eyes turned to me, a well-known lifelong Giants fan. I guess I was completely beaming because the teacher said, “Wow, Heather, you look like you’re remembering your wedding day instead of the Super Bowl!”

That was NOT an appropriate time for the next words that came out of my mouth… “The Super Bowl was way better than my wedding day.” LET ME EXPLAIN! First of all, the couples in that class that know us the best laughed right along with us, because they know that neither my husband nor I enjoyed our wedding all that much. Luckily, you can have a good marriage, even if your wedding wasn’t what you had in mind.

And my husband, who is ever more tolerant of my missing filter, smiled at me, took my hand in his…with the whole class looking on…and said, “It was a really awesome catch!” Basically agreeing that we’d rather toast the Giants’ two recent Super Bowl wins on our anniversary than a stressful wedding day we had twelve years ago.

My mouth and my lack of direction are liabilities, but hopefully I’ll always have people around to get me out of the dangerous situations they both get me into on a regular basis. Because I’m pretty sure that if either of those things was going to change about me, there’d be some sign of that by now.