Dave Rice 10-30-08

I know it’s been a while…but I managed to muster up the energy to type up some semi-coherent yet completely random thoughts. Please keep in mind that the opinions expressed within this rant are not necessarily those of the Bubba the Love Sponge® Show, but I have been asked to post a blog so here is what’s on my mind…

I happened to catch a few minutes of the Obama infomercial last night…It appears to me that both candidates are focusing on all of the wrong stuff. They are really good at telling you what you want to hear, but neither one of them is going to fix a damn thing. I heard a clip about a teacher that has to work two jobs to make ends meet for her family….the candidates both say that teachers are underpaid, which they are (my wife is an awesome, but completely underpaid public school teacher). I recall a time not too long ago, when a teacher’s salary wasn’t that bad…so what happened? Does everybody need raises (which would cost a ton)? Or, do we need to get to the root of the problem and correct the outrageously inflated cost of housing and health care, which appear to be the average family’s largest expenses? Keep in mind that the mortgage lending process is almost criminal, and the banks have caused the housing prices to skyrocket disproportionate to everyone’s salaries. What makes more sense, to pay everyone more, or to stop one industry’s greedy practices?

I also hear the candidates talking about health care, but they aren’t saying anything important here either. How about asking why health insurance is so expensive…or even why health care itself is not affordable without insurance. Maybe it has something to do with the insurance industry having more pull in Washington than you do. It’s really that simple. Any other talk is just a waste of our time. Call me crazy, but this is just one more greedy industry that has literally forced its overpriced products on us, all with the enthusiastic approval of our government. So…do we cut rebate checks for health care cost assistance to every man, woman and child or do we stop one more industry’s greedy practices? Hmmm…starting to sense a pattern here.

Another clip from Obama’s infomercial showed a family that lives in a town that is completely reliant on an automobile manufacturing plant to stay alive. How did we get to this point? How are we so reliant on a company, that if they close a location or cut back on employees a whole town can collapse? Handing out welfare or tax cuts to these people is a poor attempt at a quick fix. Politicians need to stop catering to big business and focus on the citizens who are the core of this country, or we’ll …oh, wait…we’re already there. Somewhere along the way, a perversion of capitalism seems to have gotten the best of us. In my opinion, none of the politicians will do a damn thing about any of these issues. They are the ones that allowed things to get this way. They are the ones that would rather do favors, than do what is right. They don’t get to where they are in their careers without making friends with big business…after all, you gotta get that campaign funding from somewhere right? How much campaign funding did Jefferson need to be a good president?…

Of course I wouldn’t go off on a rant without some kind of proposed solution…The first thing we can do is try simplifying our lives…we don’t need to have everything, and we certainly don’t need to have it all right now. Try buying only what you and your family absolutely needs to have. If you don’t make much money, stop fucking spending it… I have a real hard time driving through a “poor” neighborhood and seeing a big plasma TV in the living room, a satellite TV dish on the roof and a new car in the driveway of all the houses…are you fucking kidding me? Our kids don’t need $100 shoes and the latest iPod. They need to go outside and play…then maybe read a fucking book. If we weren’t so consumed with convenience, and the need to have a grocery store, gas station, fast food restaurant or super department store on every corner, then those businesses wouldn’t be able to set salaries so low, and we all would make more money. If we stop feeding the big business monster, it will eventually starve.

The second and most important solution to all of our problems is simply education. The more we know, the less shady people can get away with.  We have stopped advancing as a society because the majority of the population is ignorant…not stupid, or incapable of learning… just ignorant. They don’t feel a need to learn. They don’t see the big picture. They are perfectly happy being told what to think and immersing themselves in entertainment and material things. They don’t even realize that they are being taken advantage of. Why take the time to learn about how the world really works when there is a new episode of someone else’s reality waiting on your Tivo?…Why economy proof yourself and learn a couple of real skills, when you can get a job that takes no brain power what so ever? Why strive to set yourself apart from the rest of the population when you can just blend in and barely scrape by?…Why do the responsible thing and teach our kids about sex before they start screwing when we can just leave everything to chance?

Its time to take responsibility for the state of our nation…we let this happen because we allowed ourselves to be outsmarted. It’s time to learn from our mistakes. – Dave Rice