Asking for the Stars to get the Moon
Years ago my niece gave somebody else in the family a book titled "100 Ways To Motivate Yourself" by Steve Chandler. She hadn't read the book and I think it was meant to be a joke for the person she gave it to. I somehow got hold of the book and once I started reading it, I couldn't stop. Since then, I have read that book several times as well as given away several copies.
Steve Chandler is a professional motivational speaker, coach, and author. He writes a lot about pessimism versus optimism, and he does it quite well. One of his over all themes is "go to extremes to get results", i.e. if you want to have a better talking voice, practice by singing opera. If your child is having a hard time hitting a baseball, practice by pitching golf balls instead of baseballs and when he faces a baseball coming at him, it will look like a watermelon being thrown in slow motion.
This is good logic because it works. When I read this, I became aware that most of us use this same technique in many other areas of life besides improving a skill. Parents use it when they tell a child to clean his room until it's spotless, hoping they will at least get their clothes picked up off the floor. In more subtle versions, you see this same technique used by car salesmen when they get you to think of a high price as acceptable and then hit you with the sale price, which is much lower but still high, and by now, your thinking it's a good deal. Some have called it "Asking for the stars in order get the moon". Politicians have mastered this art to the point of it becoming manipulation. We all know that a president will ask congress for billions more in a budget than what he really needs, expecting that the eventual compromise will give him what he originally wanted.
This new spy package that congress recently approved, is putting a whole new twist on "ask for the stars and you'll get the moon". They want us to believe they are asking for complete eaves dropping power over all Americans in order to be able to spy only on terrorist's or potential terrorist's. We are supposed to go along with this with a "wink-wink" attitude. After all, they only want to keep us safe, and if we have to open up every personal aspect of our privacy in order for the government to (wink-wink) find out what the bad guys are up to, well, whatever works.
Remember when California raised it's sales tax by 1.25% in order to pay for the damages of a major earthquake back in the eighties? It was supposed to be a temporary tax. Twenty years later and we still have that tax. Do you think president Obama is going to give up that power? Do you think that the government would relinquish that power if terrorism were to suddenly disappear? Do you think terrorism will ever disappear? And if it did disappear, terrorism would always be whatever the government defines it to be i.e. we will always have terrorism and therefore the government will always have these new powers to spy on any American it chooses to, for any reason, from now on.
Those in power will spy on other politicians for political purposes. The IRS will eventually have these powers at their disposal to better target their audits. Who knows to what end these powers will be used, and by who? If I had to detail the steps that an open and free democracy would go thru to become a closed government controlled society, the first step would be to promote fear. Fear manipulates people into giving up freedoms in order to feel safe. Giving up our privacy, allowing the government to know anything they want to know about any of it's citizens is the first step, and maybe the only step needed, to eventually loosing our democracy altogether. Isn't it amazing that the same conservative's who love to preach about getting government out of our personal lives, are the ones who push these kinds of legislation's into law, especially when they have a conservative in the white house?
Shame on Barak Obama for voting for this bill. In his eager quest to appeal to the middle of the road undecided's, he has demonstrated that he is not the emissary of change he would like us all to believe he is, but rather just another politician. Oh I'll still vote for him in November, but now instead of voting for hope and change, I will be voting for the lesser of two evils....and just that's sad.