BANGOR – “People, I just want to say … can we just all get along?”

Many of us remember the case of Rodney King, the man arrested and beaten by Los Angeles police in 1992, sparking an ugly riot. We’re still, 20 years later, not getting along, which upsets a lot of people who believe political compromise is the legislative summum bonum.

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President Obama waves to the crowd Wednesday after speaking at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Re-electing Obama “would change the nation ... into just another depressed welfare state where the government runs everything,” according to a reader. The Associated Press

Our Founding Fathers deliberately did not agree with this approach. We now hear from many who want to fix our contentious scenes in Washington and Augusta. Thus we read about No Labels, Americans Elect, OneMaine, etc., and now an “independent” (real-ly?) candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Whenever the Democrats’ agenda comes into disfavor with the public, these people spring up like weeds. Their proposals often sound attractive, rely on generous public funding and don’t work. This is typical of liberalism, and those mentioned should be recognized as what they are: “progressives” in sheep’s clothing.

The stakes in this election year could not be higher. The re-election of President Barack Obama with a Democratic-run Congress would change the nation, irreversibly transforming us from the most free and prosperous country the world has ever seen into just another depressed welfare state where the government runs everything.

How has that worked out in Europe? As the author Mark Steyn has observed from the several countries in which he has lived, “When the government gets bigger, everything else gets smaller.”

What needs fixing? The unimaginably huge federal deficits and the incomprehensible national debt would be the starting point. One fellow has tried to imagine the debt. He has figured that using a stack of million dollar bills ($1,000,000 each bill), the stack would be more than a mile high. I’ll take his word for it.

These astronomically large figures have increased greatly since our president took office. Taxing every millionaire to his last penny would hardly make a dent in the deficit. The problem is spending. So full steam ahead, Capt. Obama, this ship is unsinkable. Icebergs out there? Skipper has a brilliant crew. Not to worry.

And there is big government: We are close now to complete governmental control of health care, and when that happens there is nothing that can’t be used as an excuse to reduce its expenses. There are and will be more regulations, daily, right down to the allowed composition of the kid’s school lunch box, packed by her mother in Raeford, N.C., decreed unacceptable in February and confiscated by a state official.

The Environmental Protection Agency is on a roll, making rules faster than the printing presses can keep pace. Do you like the idea of the federal government dictating what light bulbs you may use?

This is “tyranny by regulation,” as someone has said. The Ministry of Truth, our liberal press, will continue to advocate for more government control of every aspect of our lives. Is this the kind of Orwellian future you want for your children and grandchildren?

It’s sad to watch our country commit economic suicide, gradually, through energy starvation. For the foreseeable future we will need, to maintain anything close to our standard of living, the energy we can produce from all sources, including “fossil fuels,” which we and our Canadian neighbors have in abundance.

Should it be locked up in a quixotic mission to have our needs increasingly supplied by more expensive, inefficient and unreliable “green” energy? I think not. Every effort made to increase substantially our supply of reliable fuel, including nuclear and hydro, is opposed by the Greens.

Extreme Green, which has become a cult (Earth Day is its Great Festival) had its origin as a laudable movement to clean up our environment. Today, it has leaped the bounds of reason. It’s based on a creed that posits that people are the source of everything wrong with everything. Not so.

Runaway liberalism, from both major parties attempting to buy votes, is responsible for most of what ails our country, and for far too long.

Our Founding Fathers deliberately designed separation of governmental powers to encourage debate and to thwart the ambition of would-be tyrants. Compromise is not always in the national interest. Debate should be civil always, but we should not “all get along” until the destructive agenda of the “progressives” is defeated and our country is restored to its historic promise. 

Alan W. Boone is a retired physician living in Bangor.

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