政治体制也会长癌？听听一位美国佬苦诉美国现时民主没落的病症

前天看到一篇email发来的文章，作者是一位美国79岁的老人。他在这块美丽的土地上曾经享受过几十年淳朴的民主繁荣生活。但是今天，他不忍心看到美国近几十年来，民主政治已经被贪婪的政客们捣烂了。他以写信给代表他州的两个Senators 的方式来表达他对现在美国民主政治的贪婪腐败现象和表述他对民主的失望和无力感。他的信写的针针见血，淋沥尽至，病徴危殆。可以说是一个爱国的民主卫士发出了他最后而有力的求救呼声。请看他的信如下：

Subject: A Senior Citizen tells it like it is

Dear Senator:

I have tried to live by the rules my entire life. My father was a Command Sergeant Major, U.S. Army, who died of combat related stresses shortly after his retirement. It was he who instilled in me those virtues he felt important - honesty, duty, patriotism and obeying the laws of God and of our various governments. I have served my
country, paid my taxes, worked hard, volunteered and donated my fair share of money, time and artifacts.

Today, as I approach my 79th birthday, I am heart-broken when I look at my
country and my government. I shall only point out a very few things abysmally
wrong which you can multiply by a thousand fold. I have calculated that all the
money I have paid in income taxes my entire life cannot even keep the Senate barbershop open for one year!
Only Heaven and a few tight-lipped actuarial types know what the Senate dining room costs the taxpayers. So please, enjoy your haircuts and meals on us.

Last year, the president spent an estimated $1.4 billion on himself and his family.
The vice president spends millions on hotels. They have had 8 vacations so far
this year!

And our House of Representatives and Senate have become America 's answer to
the Saudi royal family. You have become the "perfumed princes and princesses" of our country.

In the middle of the night, you voted in the Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a.
"Obama Care," a bill which no more than a handful of senators or representatives read more than
several paragraphs, crammed it down our throats, and then promptly exempted yourselves from it, substituting your own taxpayer-subsidized golden health care insurance.

You live exceedingly well, eat and drink as well as the "one
percenters," consistently vote yourselves perks and pay raises while
making 3.5 times the average U.S. individual income, and give up nothing while you (as well as the president
and veep) ask us to sacrifice due to sequestration (for which, of course, you plan to blame the Republicans, anyway).

You understand very well the only two rules you need to know - (1) How to get elected, and (2) How to get re-elected. And you do this with the aid of an eagerly willing and partisan press, speeches permeated with a certain economy of truth, and by buying the votes of the greedy, the ill-informed and under-educated citizens (and non-citizens, too, many of whom do vote) who are looking for a handout rather than a job. Your so-called "safety net" has become a hammock for the lazy. And, what is it now, about 49 or 50 million on food stamps - pretty much all Democratic voters - and the program is absolutely rife with fraud with absolutely no congressional oversight?

I would offer that you are not entirely to blame. What changed you is the
seductive environment of power in which you have immersed yourselves. It is the
nature of both houses of Congress which requires you to subordinate your virtue in order to get anything done until you have achieved a leadership role. To paraphrase President Reagan, it appears that the second oldest profession (politics), bears a remarkably strong resemblance to the oldest.

As the hirsute first Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834 - 1902), English historian and moralist, so aptly and accurately stated, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." 

I'm only guessing that this applies to the female sex as well.

Tell me, is there a more corrupt entity in this country than Congress?

While we middle class people continue to struggle, our government becomes less
and less transparent, more and more bureaucratic, and ever so much more dictatorial, using Czars and Secretaries to tell us (just to mention a very few) what kind of light bulbs we must purchase, how much soda or hamburgers we can eat, what cars we can drive, gasoline to use and what health care we must buy. Countless thousands of pages of regulations strangle our businesses costing the consumer more and more every day.

As I face my final year, or so, with cancer, my president and my government tell me "You'll just have to take a pill," while you, Senator, your colleagues, the president, and other exulted
government officials and their families will get the best possible health care
on our tax dollars until you are called home by your Creator, while also enjoying a retirement beyond my
wildest dreams, which of course, you voted for yourselves and we pay for.

The chances of you reading this letter are practically zero as your staff will not pass it on, but with a
little luck, a form letter response might be generated by them with an auto signature applied, hoping we will believe that you, our senator or representative, has heard us and actually cares. This letter will, however, go online where many others will have the chance to read one person's opinion, rightly or wrongly, about this government, its administration and its senators and representatives.

I only hope that occasionally you might quietly thank the taxpayer for all the generous entitlements
which you have voted yourselves, for which, by law, we must pay, unless, of course, it just goes on the $17 trillion national debt for which your children and ours, and your grandchildren and ours, ad infinitum, must eventually try to pick up the tab.


My final thoughts are that it must take a person who has either lost his or her soul, or conscience, or
both, to seek re-election and continue to destroy this country I deeply love and put it so far in debt that we will never pay it off, while your lot improves by the minute, because of your power.

For you, Senator, will never stand up to the rascals in your House who constantly deceive the American people. And that, my dear Senator, is how power has corrupted you and the entire Congress. The only answer to clean up this cesspool is term limits. This, of course, will kill the goose that lays your golden eggs. And woe be to him (or her) who would dare to bring it up.



Sincerely,

Bill Schoonover

3096 Angela Lane

Oak Harbor, WA  98277