Open Letter To All 18 Year Olds

Congratulations on your arrival to the voter list, and congratulations to all who are graduating.  Some of you are heading into colleges and universities.  Some of you are hitting the streets to knock on doors in search of jobs.  Some of you already have hit those streets and have been successful, while others have  discovered undemanding solace in a particular corner of a parent’s couch.

 Whatever your priorities and whatever your circumstance, remember this admonition, you are the first generation, since the founding of this great Nation, which will never retire.  Ever.  Oh, a very few of you will inherit some shrunk fortunes, which will keep declining in lock-step with the shrinking dollar, but most of you will have to make your own way with the tools you have appropriated.

You will spend a majority of your waking moments competing with millions of new arrivals for jobs in a shrinking job market.

You will live under the invasive cloud of the state, manipulated at federal, state and local levels by ideologically entrenched government bureaucracies.   You saw how the power of the IRS was used to attack those who did not support liberal socialist ideologues. If you consider yourselves open minded, how does this brazen assault on your rights correspond with your own common sense?  Are these the actions of a government which you feel comforted by?  Is this Administration designing a country which you believe will be conducive to your enjoyment of successful employment, or to a rewarding personal life?

Are you aware of the changes being implemented in your healthcare system?  Do you realize that you will not be able to find a family doctor for yourself or your loved ones?  When your time comes to need a doctor, you will discover that private practices will have become an institution of the past.  You will be required to consult GPs working out of clinics.  You will wait hours to be served, and when you require serious medical attention, such as an operation, you will wait, and you will wait.  You will not wait a month or two, but a year or two.  As you get older, and older, you will discover that even that mediocre level of service will slowly, but assuredly decline.  The system will not have enough funding to provide you with the medical care you think you have paid for and deserve.  Many decisions will be beyond your control, and your needs will be secondary to the priorities of the ’system’ and its financial viability.  Bureaucrats, doctors and surgeons, will make decisions on your behalf without your input.

You will eventually come to know that the lingering fear in your gut over the long delays for that critical operation, were well founded, and out of your hands.  You will find that many operations will be considered ‘elective’ even if they are critical to your wellbeing and long term health.  Remember that term. It will one day haunt you and will come to cost you.  The bureaucracy will make most of those decisions for you. But most of you don’t care about doctors and health concerns right now. Such are the concerns of  ‘old people.’  Still, in violation of the Constitution, this President has decreed that you are now forced to purchase health insurance.  Yes, ‘forced.’

Let’s look at what else has occurred while you were awaiting your consequential graduation to ‘voter.’

Your Nation’s Constitution has been highjacked and abused by an Administration which considers itself above the need to heed the Constitution’s most fundamental principles and tenets – the very principles the President swore to uphold.  You may have left primary school when America was a Constitutional Republic, but you are graduating as it is irreversibly being converted into a crony capitalist nation centrally controlled by a  despotic government.

Your Supreme Court has become a political vehicle used as a pandering legislative agency obligated to the Administration which positioned the justices.  For example, your Supreme Court judged the  Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as being Constitutional.  It decided that the government can force you to purchase insurance. How did it justify that?  It executed a logistical summersault and qualified the enforcement of a financial penalty as being a tax.  Penalty  =  Tax  =  Constitution?  You know, like “it depends on what the definition of is, is.” Just make it up as you go along. Who’s going to tell the Supremes they can’t?  No one, it seems.  But remember this:  Chief Justice John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan don’t know what the meaning of “is,” is.   Justices Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have understood perfectly.

Your Administration has disregarded the fundamental separation of powers, as it imposed its political ideology on the vast bureaucracy of the state. In its violation of the Constitution, the Administration has usurped your powers.  Only those with short memories will have forgotten that in January of 2012, the President trashed the Senate’s power of “advice and consent” as mandated by the Constitution when he made the unprecedented appointments of four commissions including three members to the National Labor Relations Board one to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).  Take a few minutes sometime to dig into what the CFPB digs into, then compile in your heads what you have learned of the bureaucratic overreach which this Administration has shown a propensity for, and surprise – just another intrusive organization invading your financial affairs. How great is that?  You may not care today, but wait a few years when you locate microscopes in places  you weren’t aware you had opened for encroachment.  Your grumbling will be audible, but it will be pointless against the obnoxious wave of deaf conceit flowing from Washington.

Your Nation is being transformed into an authoritarian socialist motherland.  Don’t look for the process to jump the track and ride onto the fictional collectivist utopia some of you have thought you’d inhale yourselves into.  You are stepping onto a train led by a dysfunctional egoistic cluster of self-loathing individuals who have little respect for any of you.  You will either be herded into the corral of sycophants, receiving handouts for your capitulation, or you will be locked out of the compound, hoping the wind sweeps crumbs your way for sustenance.

Fear has only been one of the effectively used motivators  in the conversion of your Nation. The transformation was not an accident – it has been willful.  Led by sanctimonious people convinced that they morally know better what is right for all others, these individuals are immersed in ideologies diametrically opposed to the original intentions of the Framers of your Constitution. All levels of your system of governance are being altered.   The process has not been subtle.

While you were preoccupied with Legend of Zelda and distracted with the suitability of the name given to a Hollywood star’s new baby, your leaders in Washington made endless decisions rooted in fear.  For example, the fear of terrorists legitimized excessive invasion of your privacy.  The fear of global financial calamity justified and rationalized in panic, a massive borrowing to bail-out too-big-to-fail financial institutions and auto manufacturers which should never have been allowed to survive incompetence and fraud.

The amount of extravagant borrowing, orchestrated in your name, will become more meaningful to all of you as  that reality empties your wallets and bank accounts in the coming years.  Taxes were raised, and will continue to be raised by your leaders who know of no other method to raise money for their grand plans, their fantasies and their personal fortunes.   They have convinced a bare majority of your parents, and your grandparents, that the bigger the government, the better the government, and the more effectively it can take care of them.  Your parents and your grandparents watched submissively as their taxes rose, but you will be punished with a double whammy.  Your taxes will not only continue to rise, but you and your children are the generations which will also be responsible for that giant debt accumulated for the benefit of predecessors. That debt is a tax burden by a different name, and you will have no choice but to bear it.

You are an indentured generation. Like it or not, understand it or not, you are trapped in a lifelong vice of debt.  You are stepping out into a society which has long been convinced that ‘debt is good’.  It doesn’t know why it believes that, but since it’s been promulgated and recited so ardently for over half a century, the baffling refrain has saturated every pore of your world.

You will eventually come to familiarize yourselves with the significance of organizations such as The Federal Reserve, or the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland.  These organizations influence your wellbeing and the wellbeing of the Nation you thought was yours.  You do not control these organizations, you do not own them, and neither does your government.  Most of you have little knowledge of what they are, or what they do, and they, like to keep it that way.   The Federal Reserve is your Central Bank and is an offshore entity owned by a group of U.S. and European Banks, well, it’s not really yours, but it’s the organization which impacts your every waking moment. Central banks are not managed by practical individuals with any experience which can inspire their decisions.   They are economists immersed in theoretical concepts and abstractions from which they dictate the direction and tenor of your present and your future.

Do you recall growing up believing that cartels were illegal, and that Unicorns could heal the sick and purify water?  Do you remember feeling comforted by the thought that there were laws against oligopolistic environments and monopolistic practices?  Yes?  But you don’t wonder how or why all the large banks charge the same interest rates on loans?   No surprise, no one else does either. Sure, there are laws against price fixing, and it would be wonderful if there existed real competition in banking, but, well, but nothing.   The Bank for International Settlements, is where the heads of central banks go to decide your destiny.  They deserve somewhere to meet that is comfortably out of sight of boisterous crowds with prying eyes and placards, and of course, they occasionally need a clearing house, so the BIS is their bank.

As you grab hold of your life and step into your tomorrows, you might recall a few of these exhortations.  Since most of you like to think of  yourselves as being of sound mind, please accept that your government was never originally intended to trample your rights, at least as the Framers of the Constitution intended it, and astutely structured it.  Assess what personal freedom you have lost,  then assert your own lines in the sand beyond which you will not allow intrusion and oppression.  If you don’t, others will decide for you and you will find yourself trapped in an ideological corral, unable to breath the Freedom which might have been yours.

Take responsibility for your actions, particularly your mistakes, ignoring the example you have witnessed of the current President.  The acknowledgement will inform your own development and growth.  Ascribing blame onto others vacates your capacities to learn anything.

One more proposition:   Reject most of the concocted ‘wisdom’ you have been fed  and absorbed throughout your school years since Kindergarten. Spurn the fantasies.  As you make your way, heed your own common sense, and your own intuition.