congress

I had another post ready to go for Free For All Friday, but after getting a glimpse of the news this morning, I decided I needed to write about something else. That something else? Our government. Now, I very well could not have all the facts right, and that’s because I usually don’t watch the news because it makes me depressed. I would just rather not know what heinous crimes have been committed and all the other terrible things that go on every day.

But anyway, from what I understand, in seven days if Congress doesn’t get their act together, some serious budget cuts are going to go into affect. I have no problem with cutting the budget since we obviously spend way more than we should be as a nation. My problem is, not two years ago we were all sitting around worried about the looming government shutdown. I remember it very clearly because my husband had just returned from Iraq from his second tour of duty, and we were getting ready to head home for leave. We weren’t even going to go home because we didn’t know whether or not we could pull it off if the government shut down. At the last minute Congress pulled their act together and kept the shutdown from happening, so we got to go home and see our family.

My point is, all of America is basically controlled by these people in Congress. I understand that’s how it’s supposed to be. “No taxation without representation”. I get that. I remember that from school. These are the people who are supposed to represent the American public. But they don’t. They don’t at all. The people who sit in Congress make way more money than Joe America and Jane America do, and from what I read, they don’t work near as many days as Joe and Jane do in order to earn that paycheck. And these are the people that are potentially going to shut down America.

We receive a government paycheck. My husband is Army, and that is a government paycheck. We live paycheck to paycheck. We don’t make insane amounts of money, but we live comfortably. I don’t have to work in order for us to make ends meet, and that is a great thing considering the cost of child care is outrageous. If we don’t get paid, just like many, many other families, we don’t survive. And I don’t think that’s fair. The people who sit in Congress are holding my husband’s paycheck above a paper shredder right now, and I don’t like it. Americans should not have to live in fear of their own government, because that’s what I do. I don’t want to be worried, and I’ve tried to remain calm, but here we are, a week out from D-Day so to speak, and the calm is slowly fading.

As good citizens, my husband and I, just like many others, have held up our end of the bargain. He goes to work every single day, many days when he doesn’t want to. He can’t call in sick, because it doesn’t work that way. He has walked into a war zone three times, and the people in Congress don’t care. Or maybe it’s Americans that don’t care. After all, the people who are in office are people who have been elected. I just think that if our Founding Fathers could see what has gone on in this nation, they’d be rolling in their graves. I’m proud to be an American, I really and truly am, but I spend way too much time worrying about what the people in Congress are going to do, and I spend just as much time praying that they can get over themselves long enough to protect us.

So my final say in all of this is this: If the people in Congress can’t get their sh** together long enough to come to a conclusion, then the American public needs to do something. We need to figure out how to get them out of office because they aren’t doing their jobs, and if their not doing their jobs, then they don’t deserve a paycheck.