Plans

My friends, it is with great pleasure that I announce that I am now President of the United States, here today, in front of my adorning supporters.

Politics is not a topic that I am well-versed in, and, as such, I cannot sit here and tell you all the things that you want to hear. That will put me at a great disadvantage in the upcoming months, because what you want to hear and what you need to hear are not always the same thing.

I am aware of the greatness of this country. Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of what a wonderful and bountiful world that we exist in. However, not a day passes that I am also not reminded of the uncontrolled and unwarranted greed which permeates our entire being. I've seen kind men help little old ladies do their groceries, but I've also seen the same men risk their life and the lives of others running a red to shave a little time off their travelling.

I know what the people of America want, and I'm here to say that you cannot have it.

Everybody wants to be employee of the month. everybody thinks they deserve employee of the month. Problem is, nobody works towards that prestigious title. We all want something for free, and we want more than the next guy. We want to be powerful and rich, and we want it for nothing at all.

I'm here to tell you that you aren't stupid for thinking that, but you are wrong. We need to meet the basic needs of our country before we meet the needs of just you. We need to make sure that sickness is met with the best care. We need to ensure that our schools are filled with the best teachers. We need to guarantee that being poor does not mean being worthless. When money comes in and it is time to section it out, that money needs to go to the people failing to survive day by day, not the people who want a slightly larger television.

The rules of politics, as they are now, dictate that I shouldn't tell you this. They also dictate that I promise you a gold-plated care and your own personal parking space. They dictate that I should make you feel important. Well... you are. Just not like you think you are. We all live in the same society, and our importance in that society is distinct. But getting richer does not increase your importance, and being in poverty greatly destroys it. The way you increase your importance is not based on what you have, but what you do.

Do you have a problem with gays marrying? Abortion? Pre-martial sex? I do, but realistically speaking... tough. We all live in this society together, and I'm not about to let one group of people decide what's best for another group of people who are perfectly capable of making their own decisions. How would you feel if someone came up to you and said that you couldn't worship God? I will protect your right to do just that, exactly as I would protect the right of any citizen of sound mind and body to make the decisions which concern their own welfare and nobody else's.

But what about the people who can't make their own decisions? What about the people who don't want to? These people are hardly worthless. Where they falter in one area, they can more than make up for in others. We will help these people not by making their decisions, but by educating them on how to do it on their own. Even when we help them, the decision to accept our help or go it alone will always be available to them. Only in situations where the well-being of others is at stake will we put in boundaries, and even then, we'll make sure they know where those boundaries are before they decide to cross them.

I'm going to raise taxes, because our government needs the money. We've got a war going on, and we cannot afford it any longer. We've got people dying around the world, and we can't help them. You're just going to buy an SUV that you don't really need, anyway. Tell me that you deserve your money more than a kid who can't get hospital care because his family members are all drug addicts. We've got sick people. We've got poor people. We've got people of one race or religion dominated by people of another race or religion. We've got mutated people, too. We've got crime. We've got wars. It's time to stop watching cable news, and it's time to start doing something about the stuff shown on it. That O'Reilly guy is ugly on an HDTV, anyway.

We live in a varied and beautiful country - just a small part of a varied and beautiful world. In the grand scheme of things, it may be small, but it is important to us because our country means something. It was built upon an ideal; an ideal which has guided our development and culture into a world no other culture could manage. This tiny little ideal has allowed us to explore creativity and technology and take it to extremes undreamed of by even the greatest thinkers of the past. We are done building on the past. We are now paving the future. All of this because of one simple ideal.

All people are treated as equal in the eyes of the law.

I think that we forget what that means, sometimes. We like to think of that when it benefits somebody, but not when it inconveniences them. It means that if people aren't being treated as equal, then we've got to enforce it until they are. It means that wants and needs must be separated and sorted by priority of the want/need itself - no matter how much taxes you pay. It means that schools in poor districts deserve to have the same quality teachers at the rich private schools. It means that if any one group gets too far away from the medium, in either direction, we need to start bringing them back.

You want a new car, but that's because your basic needs are already being taken care of. Some of them by us, the government. That you can even dream of purchasing a $50,000 vehicle, owning your own home, and sending your kids to college means that we are doing our job. But we aren't doing it as well as we used to. We're skimping on the important stuff.

Vote for me. As President, I promise to look out for all the citizens of the United States. I'm going to make a whole lot of you furious, because I'm not running the country the same way you would. Chances are, you may not see the effects of my social and economic plans directly for years, if ever. My name will not go down in history as the greatest President, because the things that to be done take time and they take money, and the immediate rewards are few and far between.

But it's worth it.

I love this country. I love everything that it used to stand for. It's now sick and broken, and I want to help it, because I don't want it to die.