Service before self!
There are so many human beings in this world who do not work for large sums of money and who willingly pay the highest tax rates in their class for the right to do so. These people have made choices to care for the elderly or work in social situations or so many other things that do not pay well because that is what they like to do. Although some can do no better than minimum wage because of various factors, including simply intelligence, many others could make much more money than they do except for the fact that they feel the call to do something that is appealing to them for their fellow man.
We have an American president in office today in Barack Obama who could have made much more money than what he has if he had chosen to go into the private sector where he could have made untold millions. Instead he chose, after a brilliant career at one of our leadings ivy league colleges, to go into things like community organizing to better the lot of his fellow man. Make no mistake about it, it was a choice made, and, made willingly. Some have said that Obama had ambitions toward the presidency long ago but we find it difficult to believe that he had them as long ago as his street organizing days.
Barack Obama is but one of a long line of people who have chosen service over self.
On this day--April fifteenth--each and every year millions of Americans choose to pay, very willingly, their income taxes which is what helps to keep this democracy functioning. Some, like the billionaire
Warren Buffet, would like for us to pay more in taxes as they see the decay of the country under the influence of the Republican party and its anti tax crusade. Others, now aging, remember the great dangers that this nation faced during the last century such as world war two and the cold war that they had to face personally, and, they are more than willing to pay their taxes because they know the great sacrifices that were made to preserve that right. Most of these people know and remember someone or several someone’s who never got the right to pay any taxes because they died on the beaches of places like Normandy during the second world war. Or the great coldness of Korea!
Those who provide the protection for president Obama know very intimately the dangers that he faces each and every day that he inhabits the office of the presidency of the United States. And, it is on this day in history that we remember the death of president Abraham Lincoln, who died after over four years of anguish as he struggled to preserve the union that we all take so much for granted these days, and, that some would like to so willingly dissolve or override. And it was just three days ago, on April twelfth, that we commemorated the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the wheel chair and leg brace bound man who came into the office of the presidency at a time when no one was sure that this nation would survive intact the horrors of the great depression. Roosevelt, in effect, gave his life in service to his nation when he could have lived a life of great comfort as an heir to the family fortune and never faced the issues that he so willingly took on.
It was on this same day 101 years ago that some barely paid people stood their posts as they saved as many women and children as they could before they went to their deaths aboard the great passenger liner Titanic. To their credit, some very wealthy individuals stood on those decks with them and died gallant deaths as the cold waters of the north Atlantic ocean engulfed them all.
So many have lived and died such often anonymous deaths in service to their fellow man and to insure the survival of a system of government and life so that their children and their grandchildren and future generations could enjoy the benefits from what past generations had done for them. It is an eternal pay it forward situation that has formed a beneficial circle of life, and death, that has done nothing but insure the choices that we are able to make as free people living in a free society can enjoy. All of those eyes of the past look down on us today and they might acknowledge the statement put to us by president Kennedy in his inaugural speech on January twentieth, 1961: Ask not what your country can do for you, but, rather, what you can do for your country. Paying taxes is the least of those sacrifices.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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