lonecity.com

Picture a scene where a mother in a park buys two ice cream cones for her children.  One child is rowdy and more excited about running off to play on the monkey bars.  The other child is calm and composed.  This child is carefully licking the ice cream so it doesn’t drip.  Care is taken so that every last bit of this ice cream can be savored.  By now we all know how this story ends.  The careless child drops the cone and in an effort to curb the whining little brat mom steps in and does the unthinkable.  She forces the well behaved child to give up half their cone to appease the other child.  This scenario, however simple and unmeaning really represents how life has been for me all along.  It doesn’t matter how hard I work, how good I behave, or even what I say when someone comes for it.  I always earn my ice cream cone and someone else always gets it.

In the real world, the government plays the part of good old mom.  I work very hard to put a little money aside, start a business, and be a successful person.  (not working out nearly as well as I’d hoped, but I still try.)  Out of that income the government takes a portion as tax.  I think thats great.  After all, I can’t afford to pay police officers, build librarys, and pave roads.  A small stipend from everyone makes these larger projects possible.  Heres where I get a little upset though.  Child tax credits, Earned Income Credit, ect.  I don’t have any dependants to claim so my tax money is taken and litterally given to families who have so many kids they can’t afford to pay for them.  They’re rewarded for being irresponsible and its my ice cream cone they’re getting.

Lets move this to a bigger scale.  I put every cent I can into trying to start a successfull business.  Its barely afloat and likely won’t succeed.  The numbers are just against it.  Still I know that its only chance is for me to continue to infuse my money into it and work hard.  In the end if it fails I’m out what I invested, and if it succeeds I might retire with a little bit of a nest egg.  All in all its a fair system.  So when a company thats making hundreds of billions of dollars a year (auto makers!!!) all of a sudden sees an economic downturn I feel they have the same gamble as I do.  Ten years ago I started hearing people talk about wanting more fuel efficient cars.  Solar energy.  Hydrogen Cells.  Ect.  The big three auto makers ignored these requests completely and focused on building monster sized SUV’s for a quick profit.  The fact that the big auto makers are now failing is a direct result of thier lack of forsight.  Had they turned some of those billions of dollars into research on fuel efficency and driving down the cost of new technology people would be lining up to buy their cars.  So what happens?  They go crying to uncle sam (mom) and they get half my ice cream cone.  I’m sorry but they don’t deserve it.

I’m a harsh realist, and I believe that letting the big three go out of business is the right thing to do.  You have to prune a tree for it to grow stronger in the places you want it to.  Its going to hurt a lot of people but the folks who had 300,000 houses and were making $80 an hour on an assembly line were getting more than they deserved.  This in turn swings to inflation with all this money thrown around.  In the end the big three auto makers are hurting the us economy more than they are helping it.  Its time to let them sink or swim.

Now lets scale back to a more personal level.  Last week I heard through the grapevine that a distant cousin of mine had her children taken away by the state.  I don’t know the details, but I don’t think it was anything sexual.  Rather I’m sure it was related to drugs or something like that.  None the less I’ve always known she wasn’t fit to be a parent.  Both of her ex husbands are doing prison time now.  Her oldest child was taken away a year ago, and now the younger two are as well.  With the way those children were growing up I honestly cant say I feel bad for her.  Starting fires, doing drugs, burglary, car theft…  Horrible parenting all around.

So now she’s coming to take away my ice cream cone.  The state needs to place her children into foster care and she knows that I’m the only one who has a job, owns a house, and doesn’t have kids that is reasonably close to where she lives.  I really was surprised when the state came asking if we wanted to adopt the kids.  It wasn’t expected.  Still from looking at the pattern I shouldn’t have been.  She’s gone and screwed up her life.  Now she wants me to pay to raise her children.  She wants the pleasure of bieng able to see them but not the responsibility of caring for them.  Well at least I can say no. 

Before all of you start to think I’m a horrible person for saying no, I have to say that I don’t feel any guilt in refusing her pleas.  I quite honestly believe that for those children to have a chance in life they need to be taken as far away from their mother as is humanly possible.  They should never be allowed to see her again.  I would be doing them an injustice by taking them in.  Couple that with the fact that I seldom work less than fourteen hours a day and would be wholly incapable of bieng around enough to act as a parent, and I don’t have anything to feel guilty for.

Well there is one thing I can feel guilty for.  I did take some pleasure in saying no.  It felt good not letting her have my ice cream.  Perhaps I really am a monster.