Friday, October 31, 2008

Equal Opportunity Field Day???

I just witnessed the  most depressing Field Day event ever.  What were your Field Days like when you were in elementary school?  I have happy memories of people cheering and classmates enjoying healthy competition with one another.  I was always the too-tall chubby kid, but even I was able to win some 1st place ribbons, especially since some events were team events.  Our whole class competed against other classes in events like Tug of War.  I still remember how exciting it was to see the flag move over to our side as our class pulled the other class over.  There was excitement in the air.  

Move forward about 30 years.  My daughter told me last week that her school would be having Field Day on Halloween.  I talked it up to be a really fun thing, and I told her I'd come watch her.  So this morning I went up to the school ready to watch the fun.  I knew something was wrong when the teacher announced that the kids had to stay with their buddy.  They could only compete against that one partner.  So there were no races with different heats, no races with more than two people competing.  And when I say "competing," I'm using the word very loosely.  I rarely heard anyone saying "On your mark, get set, go!"  It was more like, "Whenever you feel like starting, go ahead."  

Welcome to the equal opportunity Field Day.  When I started writing this post, I did not intend to relate it to politics.  I was just really disappointed that kids today don't get to experience Field Day the way it was meant to be.  But as I was writing, I realized that this is a perfect analogy to our political situation today.  Some would say that the Field Day was a success because there were no losers.  But the downside to that is that there were no winners either.  So do you know what I saw on that field today?  I saw lots of kids roaming around wondering what they were working toward.  With no clear winners, there was no goal to reach for.  There were no ribbons to reward accomplishment; the kids just had each event checked off a piece of paper as they went around the track/field.  I heard no cheers and I felt no excitement.  The kids did not get to experience the joy of playing on a team (you should've seen the sad Tug of War game...two kids holding a rope with no flag in the middle...what's the point??).  Some kids got tired of the whole thing and just went to sit in the swings.  My daughter must have wondered why I had made such a big deal out of this whole Field Day thing.  

Today I saw redistribution in action.  There were no winners and no losers, thus no motivation to excel.  If you vote for Obama, then you are saying that this is what you want your world to look like.  Obama's redistribution would actually be the equal distribution of misery.  Taking more from the wealthy and giving it to the poor gives the poor absolutely no incentive to make better lives for themselves.  The poor already get plenty of help through our all-too-generous welfare system (otherwise, we wouldn't have so many people staying on welfare year after year...welfare should be a temporary fix until you get back on your feet, not a permanent way of life).  Why make more money if the government is just going to take it away?  Why go out and actually get a job when Obama's big government will take care of you?  I personally don't want my world to look like the Field Day I saw today, because I saw lots of sad faces.  I saw kids sitting on the sidelines who are usually high energy kids who love to have fun.  But it's no fun to run a race that you have no hopes of winning.  IT JUST DOESN'T WORK.  It's not how our country became strong, and it will bring our country to destruction.  

If you don't want to see this happen, vote for McCain...vote for America...
vote for DEMOCRACY!

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