Goals – Get Real
One thing that dooms a lot of diets and attempts at lifestyle change is an unrealistic goal. Some people put a picture of when they looked good in a bathing suit on the refrigerator door as a symbol of their goal. This may work when you want to loose 10 or 20 pounds to look like you did 2 or 3 years ago. When you are 56 years old and your weight is over 290 pounds, a picture from when you looked good is just kidding yourself.
When Libertarians talk about returning to a political and social set up like there was in 1776, it is no more realistic than trying to look like I did when I was 20. We cannot go back. Then we were a small country with a small, spread out, rural population. We were out in the boondocks separated from the great powers by oceans that took days if not weeks to cross. A cannon that could be drawn by a team of horses was considered a weapon of mass destruction.
Today we are the 3rd largest nation in the world. We produce over 20% of the world’s wealth. ICBMs can reach any part of the globe in 20 minutes or less. The oceans no longer protect us. Asymmetrical warfare makes it possible for small nations and even non-nation enemies to inflict terrifying damage on our economy and even our citizens. We cannot live in the past and America knows it, even if many Libertarians do not.
Just because we cannot return to the past does not mean we cannot learn from it. America can be a better place where we can again be optimistic about our children’s futures. By optimism, I don’t mean the “Yes we can” of the Obama administration. That optimism is the joy of dropping the bag of deficit chips, leveraging ourselves off the couch and heading for the all you can eat buffet.
Once the nation sits bloated with the aftermath of this current feeding frenzy, it will be ready to listen. Not to the GOP saying forget the food poisoning, remember the great meals we cooked up, but to us saying stop thinking only about your stomach. We can tell you how to start feeling better now.