To the editor:

As we all stand by and watch our government at work I feel a bit peeved. Here we stand at a politically induced fiscal cliff with little or no help from the people we put in power. The argument at present is protecting the rich, or people who earn more than 250,000 dollars a year.

As an American citizen who spent his entire life in education, I never had the privilege of earning near that amount. I can safely say none of my friends did either. Do you think our political leaders are protecting the rich because the rich is who they are? The very people we in trust our future to are looking out for numero uno. We talk about term limits and the people who determine term limits are the same people.

Are they looking out for us? I don’t think so. I saw a prominent politician leave a meeting with the President and rush to a waiting limo where people jumped out to open the door and take his brief case and close the door. Are they royalty? Have we created a class of people who are more equal than us?

Try to speak to your representative, see if you the lowly public can speak to one of the chosen, fat chance! Somehow against the wishes of George Washington, we have produced a class of royalty that is above us and has no problem flaunting it. We rely on Social Security and Medicare and they, the royalty, have their own system. They have a very comfortable retirement plan too. None of the royals have to rely on the social system that we the public have to, yet they are willing to make cuts to the benefits for the majority of us.

What I find most upsetting is that if we, the general public, were given the opportunity to solve some of these problems we could. The reason is that we don’t owe one another favors. We don’t have a lobby that is depending on us to do the right thing. I wonder how we got so corrupt. Is it just the nature of man? I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions but I do see us as a nation in crisis. When I hear about cuts in education, I feel particularly troubled. The thought that children aren’t getting the best possible education spells disaster down the road. As it is, we have lost our competitive edge in the global economy.

American made no longer means the best. It now means the most expensive. Unless we take back control of our political representatives we are doomed as a world power. The power is out of our hands, we are powerless as political groups; Republican or Democrat. The impasse has paralyzed us. Somehow we need to get our leaders to relearn what politics is, the ability to give and take. Knowing and realizing that we don’t get all we want but each side gets some of what it wanted.

I’m not feeling optimistic about the future of our species. We don’t seem to learn from our mistakes, and that to me spells disaster.

I hope I’m wrong about this stuff.

– Rocco Lionetti, Mill Spring