Not My Cup Of Tea...

First some business. The Chronicles of IDIOT is now on Smashwords.com! Therefore, it should be available for the Barnes and Noble Nook, along with many other e-book providers soon. I will keep you updated as to when it is available! Also, since the book will be available in so many places, I will be redesigning the website to make it all more user friendly, and hopefully not confusing. Please let me know at Chronicles.of.IDIOT@gmail.com if you have any suggestions for improvement.

I have noticed that I get a few Tea Party members who try to follow me on Twitter. I think after a few posts they notice I am not in line with their views. And in the interest of full disclosure let me tell you all: I am not against government spending.

This may seem as a surprise, my profile says I am an Independent, who wrote a satire (The Chronicles of IDIOT) about a secret government organization. It would seem that I am one large tax bill away from joining the “Tea Party Patriots”. Except for one thing, like I said, I am not against government spending. In fact my family is supported by government spending. My husband is a research biochemist who works at a University for a professor who gets her research funding from the NSF and NIH. Our livelihood is funded by the government agencies of The National Science Foundation and The National Institutes for Health. Science is a wonderful thing for the government to invest in, it is an investment in the future, like education.

So why did write this satire? Well, cause I am against a certain kind of government spending: secret spending. It is inevitable that (supposedly) for our own good, the government sets up secret (and semi-secret) agencies to protect us. Such an example is the National Security Agency. Supposedly (but secretly) the NSA has set up servers all over the country and is keeping all e-mails sent in and from this country. This is an important privacy issue that the government thinks is too important for us to know about. The only reason I found out about it is there was a story about a NSA employee, Thomas Drake, who was set up on espionage charges because he was a whistle-blower about secret budgetary overspending. That is the thing, how can the spending be accountable if it is secret? If you are more interested in Mr. Drake's story, google him, the findings will scare you.

But that does not make me a Tea Party member. I agree that we need to reduce spending and get the government's budget under control. But the Tea Party seems to want it done yesterday, and whines even when they get a compromise. I remember hearing an interview with a Tea Party Member who was PLEADING for her representative to insist that we balance the government budget THIS YEAR. That logic is tantamount to sending our country into a depression that would make the 1930's look like a very nice dream. The budget is going to have to be fixed in a lifetime, not a year, or we will regret it.

There is a song by David Bowie called “I'm Afraid of Americans”. Well Mr. Bowie, I too am afraid of some of Americans. I am afraid of the ones who see compromise as a dirty word. The ones who say “if you are not with us, you are against us”. We have to work together and compromise to fix this problem, or things could get a lot worse. And you know when we need to do that? When the recession is totally over (there is still some debate about that) and more people are at work. It is during the good times that we need to buckle down and work on the debt and deficit. The only problem is during the good times (as with the bad times) everyone wants a tax cut and no one wants to sacrifice. We can start the process now, but we need to keep it up for our lifetime, then maybe our kids (and their kids) won't have to pay for it all.