Change

The buzz word is change for this election cycle. Change to or from what? For the better or for the worse? New Jersey has just become the 1st state to abolish the death penalty. Now criminals who have committed egregious murders may spend a lifetime in prison without parole. Are Americans to believe this is a change for the better or for the worse when the cost is high, the effectiveness questionable and the possibility of its actually happening nil? Congress passed the energy bill with projections to 2020, supposedly saving the taxpayers billions of dollars. Will new gas mileage and more efficient appliances and light bulbs change our lives for the better or the worse when they actually cost business, industry and the taxpayers greater billions than will actually be saved? Then Time magazine names an old style KGB communist, Vladimir Putin, Man of the Year. Does this symbolic approval of socialistic thinking represent a world-wide sea change for the better or the worse? Certainly in America, liberal political correctness from Democrat Presidential candidates affirms a change to socialistic agendas from democratic, conservative ones. The 2008 farm subsidy bill, assures that 2/3rd of the richest 10 % of farmers collect 24 billion dollars. Pork spending in Washington has not changed. On the other hand, in Saudi Arabia a victim of gang rape was just ‘pardoned’ from her lashing and jail sentence. A nice change! I hope to live long enough to celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary in 2013. But by then or by 2020, nothing about human folly will have changed.