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He’s having one of those fits again, and I’m getting annoyed. His lack of communication is being transposed into something else entirely. In his eyes I am all that is fault. Woe is he.
Elmer’s Glue
In first grade everyone always talked about how the Elmer’s glue was actually made from horses, but no one ever thought to read the ingredients listed so matter of factly on the back of the label. And no one ever questioned why Zach would always eat the glue at the slightest prompting, but we all laughed while he half choked and half chugged the entire bottle. Others of us glued our hands together just to peel them apart, shedding dried glue like snake skin. When our creations made it home they did more than hold paper hearts haphazardly on wrinkled construction paper, they kept entire home lifes from coming apart. Moms and dads would exalt our pieces of great art by pinning it on the fridge or tacking it to the wall of their office, always loving how it was just the right fit between downright ugly and wonderfully abstract. None of us would ever be real artists, not famously any way.
And this is where I stop cause I don’t know where I’m going with this.
This is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.
Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.
I am here to say they are wrong. I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them.
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| — | President Obama speaking in Osawatomie, Kansas today |
