I believe we can. By encouraging the national dialogue to focus on costs rather than battles. Costs that drive the deficit everyone hollers about already and for quite awhile. Costs that have outstripped the VA in it’s ability to respond to the shell-shocked and wounded. Costs that have piled up in our monetary focus on overseas wars rather than the national infrastructure that fails everytime we turn around.
By telling our own stories, of relatives and friends and neighbors who are there, returning and trying to recover in this uncertain economic landscape. Or those all here, who fight the culture wars at home. By telling our stories of local job-providing businesses, neighbors and friends lost to budget cuts, overseas labor, depression due to failing economies, both local and national. By telling our stories of just how many jobs that local industry keeps local by making bombs or fighter jets, humvee parts or that of other MIC contracts. I’d be willing to bet there’s not that many in actuality though I am assured they exist in every state. Prove me wrong!

Especially now in the weeks after the killing of Osama bin Laden, people all over are questioning at last why we’re out there fighting at all. We all know the answers why we should be home dealing with what we need to do here. This week the Mississippi basin is flooded. Looks like the crest has passed Memphis and Louisiana, Mississippi are doing everything to hold it back. What worked? People filling sandbags, volunteering in their neighborhoods, building levees higher still. But so far the levees have held back high water not seen since ’37 or ’27. This should give people confidence there is nothing we can’t do as the waters recede and the damage surveyed. It’ll look like a warzone and take years to recover from too.
But the idea is already dawning on people. Why on earth is Washington or the State House, or the Governor talking about budget cuts? We need to cut defense and end the big industry giveaways and take care of our own here at home.