Where's Jimmy Stewart?

I guess next to college football I love politics as much as anything in the entertainment world. I can't wait for the election cycles to roll around every two years and for things to get rolling. Having watched and studied this great American past-time for over 60 years I am beginning to have some questions about how we choose our leaders. For all these years I have just taken for granted that we try to choose leaders who will solve the problems that face us as a city, county, state or nation. I assumed the people we elect actually convene in their respective seats of power and address the problems of the times and handle the peoples business with the main focus being problem solving. I know I'm far from the sharpest knife in the drawer but I think I have finally discovered I have been wrong about this process all along. We don't elect people to solve the problems; we elect them to identify the problem and to point it out to us on a frequent basis.

How many years have politicians pointed out the same problems that just continue to plague year after year. I know that long before Dr. Blake and Dr. Wilson closed their little hospitals in Haleyville where I grew up, politicians were telling us that we had a crisis in health care in the country. Jack Kelly ran for the state House of Representatives back in the 50's talking about health care. Jack got elected and the only change in health care was that the State started paying for old folks to stay in nursing homes, one of which Jack owned. Every politician since 'Uncle' Ben Dodd has talked about crime being the downfall of our country but more people are being robbed and killed today than ever before. We're not electing people to solve the problems, we are electing folks who figure out what we are the most afraid of and identify it to our conscious minds. Now this stuff is getting pretty deep for me but I'm on a roll so just hang with me.

Since the mid 70's we have had a problem with foreign oil production. Every politician since Richard Nixon has raved on and on since those first long lines at the gas pumps about how we must free ourselves from the control of the Middle East. Has anyone done anything about the problem? At $4.00 per gallon I don't think so. Do we continue to send the same or exact replicas back to office time after time? I think so.

We have got to take another approach to the way we elect our officials. In the House of Representatives we get a fresh shot every two years. If we send someone to Washington and we don't see some change or at least read about or see our man nightly on the national news jumping up and down on the capital steps raising cane about the congress not doing anything then we should bring him or her home the next time the office is open for election. The same thing is true with our Senators. If the one we elect doesn't draw some national attention for pulling a Jimmy Stewart ('Mr. Smith Goes to Washington') at least once a year fighting for real change and not to simply be a popular Senator we should furnish him a ticket home and let him go back to whatever he was doing before we elected him.

We don't need this bunch running home two or three times a year, holding Town Meetings and telling us what all is wrong. If you took you car into a dealership's service department and came back in three days only to hear that the transmission was bad and needed to be fixed you wouldn't take that, so why do we continue to put us with the crap we get from our politicians.

Some famous French King or Queen once made the comment that all the royal family needed to do was to "feed them cake" when dealing with the people. Getting a new water line or some sewage treatment, or even a new football field, is not solving the real problems we face. We can hire someone to point out the problems, we need someone to fix those problems. A man or woman can stay in Montgomery or Washington forever the way it is now by just passing through every now and then and telling us what's wrong and they are working on it, this isn't rocket science. My Dad used to tell me that a person can just sharpen his ax for so long then he's got to cut some wood. These monkeys have been sharpening long enough. Even a fat man like me can eat cake for just so long. Let's find us some Mr. Smiths' and send them to Washington. The Press will try to make us believe they are 'nuts', but sometimes it takes a lot of 'nuts' to make a good pie.

Where is Jimmy Stewart when we need him? He stopped them from building that dam on the Boy Scouts campground.