Indepencence day

90% of funding for a public busing program in a nearby city, comes from ODOT a taxpayer funded government agency. A manager of this program says it gives "people a quality of life they didn’t have before." As a citizen who unwillingly helps pay for this social welfare nonsense, I protest. Quality of life depends upon the state of the mind, not taxpayer funded giveaways. Reading is indispensable to the intellectual life which takes precedence over the physical pursuit of pleasures. Unfortunately, busyness today continues to contribute to mental decay. America continues to rot from the inside out. 4/10th of Americans read no books at all. Half read no fiction. I watch my neighbors bear out these facts as they scurry here and there so as to be engaged in perpetual activity. Liberal intellectuals like to decry the state of readership and rational thought as they brag about their higher powers, but their readings do not lead to truth or to their practice of common sense. They still invert the reality to fit their world view. They preach liberty but aim to deny citizens the right to personal choices. They do not set a good example for commoners to follow. This independence day I know it’s foolish to hope that the trend against reading and rational thought will be slowed down. 1/3 of Americans take the Bible’s history and pronouncements literally. 1/3 claim to embrace spirituality rather than a religion. 2/3 of Americans feel that religion plays an important role in their lives. Rational thought in spite of reading, escapes the fundamentalists and those who seek satisfaction from the vagaries of spirituality. Less and less, religion represents intellectual involvement.

From what I witnessed of the enthusiasm and appreciation of a large, choreographed - to -music fireworks display, a secular spectacle substitutes for a religious experience. Americans still thwart common sense and intellectual pursuits in favor of instant, visual and sensual gratifications. A Soviet novelist in 1932 was ‘dead on’ with his contention that "writers are the engineers of human souls." Since Americans patronize writers with less frequency now than ever before, their souls migrate into places they have never gone before. That’s scarey. Independence Day does not symbolize independent thought.