An Open Letter to the Congress

Dear Senator and Congressman:

According to reliable news reports, 47% of you are worth at least a million dollars. The average Senator is worth nearly 2.5 million dollars, 110 House Republicans and 73 House Democrats report their net worth as over 1 million dollars.

How can you be wealthier than 99% of the rest of the country and claim to be representative of us? How can you even comprehend some of the struggles an average American goes through just to ensure that there is dinner on the table at the end of the day?

It is not a crime to be wealthy, in fact it is the American Dream. That 47% of our elected representatives happen to be millionaires is either testament to that dream, or evidence of its complete corruption.

It is estimated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have or will cost the US Taxpayer over four trillion dollars. Yet, here in our own country, you can walk down any major city street and encounter citizens who are hungry, homeless or sick.

You have collectively allowed the U.S. Patriot act to stand, virtually without modification, an act which is an affront on the freedoms of U.S. Citizens like none we have ever seen. Because of your inaction, Federal agencies like the FBI, CIA and NSA invade the privacy of citizens in the name of this act on a daily basis, often ruining innocent lives in the process.

You were elected because you were able to convince a majority of your constituents that you would do what was best for the country. Instead, the level of partisan bickering in Congress has risen to levels never seen before, and the actual amount of work performed has plummeted to record low levels. Were a business to depend on the amount of productive work generated by members of Congress, it would soon be bankrupt.

Although a moratorium on earmarks was set at the beginning of the 112th Congress, there are still 152 earmarks amounting to 3.3 billion dollars in pork projects according to the Citizens against Government Waste report for 2012. Hiding what were previously clearly labeled as earmarks as a different kind of legislation still results in a smelly mess, and only goes to prove how dastardly some of you are when it comes to your pet projects and how many dollars it pours into pockets of your friends, neighbor and relatives. It is despicable, although decidedly less so than in previous years.

We are a nation deeply in debt, with an increasingly inept government. We can no longer continue to be the world’s policeman and banker. We need to bring our soldiers home, and our jobs. We cannot be a great country when it is now impossible to manufacture any complex machinery without looking to foreign suppliers or labor. How much future does this country have when the best it can offer a college graduate is a job managing a fast food store and a very large debt?

Our tax laws are so complex that no ordinary citizen can begin to understand them. Should the IRS show up at one’s door claiming that we did not file properly, most of us would not begin to know how to defend ourselves from our own government.

In the past 10 years we have allowed our military to use torture, an act so despicable that there is no possible defense. That many of you find some way to defend it only makes it the worse. What now separates us from any other tyrant?

The United States of America is in a sorry state, and I fear that we are leaving nothing but chaos to our children and grandchildren. You, the representatives we have elected, have the power to begin the change and restore us to the proud and upright country we once were. We do not have to be the richest, nor do we need to exercise our military might at the least provocation, in places where we clearly are not wanted. We simply need to revert to being the best place to live and raise families. We need to revert to a time and place where the common American believed that his government was fair and right.

We need to get back to a time and place where our young people look forward to going to the voting poll, instead of ignoring it because they believe there are no longer any valid choices worth their concern.

We need for you, our elected representatives to be honest, and to be more interested in the welfare of the country than in your own pockets or status. We need for you to be able to work with your fellow elected representatives on the other side of the aisle, to be able to come to agreement and compromise and move forward to the next matter at hand.

We need for you to do the jobs we elected you to do.