As I read the article, I began to wonder, as I often do, are families, children and poverty really just "women's issues". Because even in these enlightened (cough) times, things deemed belonging to women are still viewed as less than by those in power.
To me, families, children, poverty, education, health care are national security issues. For it doesn't matter how strong our borders are, how strong our military is if we are crumbling from within.
Remember in elementary school when you were told that if you put a penny away every day, at some point you'd have a million dollars? It's the theory of exponential growth. It's the same physical reality as to why the earth's population is exploding.
We, American society, have ignored the problems of poverty and education for too long. We've tossed some money at it, we've convinced ourselves that poverty is a moral failure. We've swallowed the whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps, rags-to-riches story despite the fact that for every one person who was able to do it, there were thousands who could not.
So our poor, our uneducated, our unhealthy, are becoming a larger percentage of the population.
And our ineffective spending on these issues just causes us to spend more and more money without fixing anything. So our national debt grows and we become more in debt to other countries.
Our crumbling education system leaves us with more and more drop outs and functionally illiterate graduates who can not compete in the job market, so our jobs go overseas.
Our lack of preventive health care leads more and more young people into chronic health problems which drives up the costs of health care overall.
It isn't an issue of wrong or right. It isn't an issue of women or men. It is an issue of national security.
Since both left and right like to run out cliches, here's one: we are only as strong as our weakest link.
And we are allowing too many links to weaken.
The boyz say: But what about feline issues?
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