From The Porch Steps

Muck About’s note:  Ms. Gilfert is a local columnist from our newspaper with a weekly column as above.  She normally comments on the good old days, Florida History, etc.

This week she departed from her normal script and wrote the column presented below.  Now Nina is no spring chick, has climbed the mountains and crossed the rivers.  When she departs from her normal cheerful, informative fare, it would do us all well to listen.

Guest Post by Nina Gilfert 

We are skating on thin ice

The following is the final paragraph from an opinion piece in the Daily Commercial written by Bill Geringswald of Mount Dora. The original piece was written about our current water emergency.

“If we do not become personally involved ‘top to bottom’ with a sensitive commitment and insight of our larger environmental challenges we will end up in a concrete-covered existence profiting a handful of special interests as we are right now. The key is to project future repercussions and devise ways to empower different results. Conservation, smart land use to include land banking and recycling will be the keys protecting our recharging areas from urban sprawl. And discipline to enact common sense goals and political commitment to have this happen.”

Some of you may remember Captain Toby Williamson (now deceased) of the Leesburg Fire Department who once said in an interview many years ago that Florida’s ecology is already in trouble. When you put too many cows in the pasture, you kill the pasture. If this is true, and we know it is, why do we continue allowing more and more construction of housing projects without first assuring our present water is adequate to the situation? Do we have, as Geringswald suggests, the discipline to enact common sense goals in our water management?

We are doing the same thing with our national government, and it is never ending. We have more and more bureaucracies governing and promising more and more services and dictating more and more rules for our lives than ever before or ever intended by our Constitutional form of government. We already have an unsustainable national debt and now we are planning to fund child care for working mothers. This seems like a humanitarian project but is it just one more small tack in our governing coffin?

We are no longer governed by our three branches of government as provided by the Constitution, but by an out-of-hand bureaucracy that is not self-sustaining but is growing with each new administration — each bureau with the power to tax, regulate and prosecute.

This bureaucracy is becoming a nightmare to individual citizens determined to obey the law but not so involved about the making of those laws.

I know you are not usually used to reading about serious stuff like this under the “From the Porch Steps” heading, but I am worried. I am not worried about myself but about the future generations in this country who are headed for bankruptcy — not of their own making.

What are we going to do about this? Have you heard either your Democrat or Republican candidates for president mention this problem? Have you heard either one of them promise to reduce the taxes we pay to sustain it?

Are you against abortion simply by principle? Would you help pay for someone else’s abortion? Are you against the many women and men who have sex without benefit of matrimony and expect someone else to pay for the consequences of their lack of stability?

This isn’t a moral issue so much as it is a rights issue. If you are in a situation where you have to work and pay for childcare, do what my generation did and pinch pennies until you can keep your household above water. Don’t look for the government to pull your irons out of the fire. The Constitution does not give you that right.

By the way, did you know Sept. 17 was Constitution Day, and that Sept. 17-23 was Citizenship Week as declared by President Obama? Let’s celebrate it by being responsible citizens and accepting the results of our own life style instead of asking others to pay for it.

Nina Gilfert can be reached at [email protected].

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes. View all posts by MuckAbout