Picking One's Battles

When one listens to the news it seems inevitable that there will be at least one story that will send one over the edge.  I actually prefer not to listen to the news on the weekends because I don’t like to get annoyed by all the stupidity that goes on around the world.  I think 5 days per week of listening to the news is adequate for my psyche and quite honestly I am at the point in my life where I realize that I have to pick my battles carefully. 

       Oh, oh, where am I going with this?  Here it is, last week we heard again about the incredible amount of abuse the politicians have done with respect to expensing items.  It never ceases to amaze me that individuals can be so darn greedy that they lose all sense of integrity, that they have no comprehension about respecting taxpayers’ money, or that they see no limit to squeezing every possible cent out of “the system” while at the same time they deplore “taxpayers’ sense of entitlement”.  If I hear that word entitlement used one more time in relation to ordinary citizens I think I will go berserk and I really don’t care where I am when I do so.  It absolutely infuriates me that politicians of every stripe, in whatever country, seems to have jumped on this bandwagon Entitlement but in brackets (but it doesn’t apply to us, of course, darling).

       What is even more exasperating is that ordinary citizens are parroting these words to the point where I want to “slap them upside the head” (to use Oprah’s expression) and knock a little sense into them.  Wanting value for our tax dollars is not Entitlement.  There is nothing wrong with expecting a better quality of life for humanity in the 21^st century compared with what we had 100 years ago.  To use another aggravating phrase “whose going to pay for it” continues to make me crazy.  We are going to pay for it as soon as we get some sensible people into government who understands that having a Senate that simply is there to grab money for toadeaters (yes, Pamela Wallen, Mike Duffy, and all you other ex-CBC cronies, that means you) needs to be abolished.  We need to eliminate expense accounts, travelling (in this day and age with video conferencing technology we don’t need our politicians to go on ‘fact finding missions’ as though anyone didn’t realize that it was a paid vacation), patronage appointments, superboards for health care (that is a whole separate Rant), and many more expensive non-productive spending.