Why I support Senator Orrin Hatch
First things first. I’m a paid member of the Hatch Election Committee. I work very hard, and they pay me what amounts to less than $20,000 per year. I bring this up so people won’t reply “but you’re a paid stooge, lol!” I could be making more money elsewhere. My job isn’t about money.
Well, at least it’s not about my money.
I don’t, for the record, have a degree in economics. I did learn a little something about the dangers of spending more than you make while a new college student with his first several credit cards. It was bad. I hated debt. It took me years to get free. This country is spending money it doesn’t have. It has a lot of debt. It will take years to get free. Plain and simple.
I’m voting, and working, for Orrin Hatch for a variety of reasons, but the other issues are minor in comparison to this one big issue. It’s the problem we all face, but many people refuse to acknowledge it, much less start fixing it. We don’t have the money.
The very first step to fixing this mess is balancing the budget. I have a hard time imagining anything taking priority over ensuring that our expenditures stop exceeding our tax revenues.
Great, so we balance the budget!
It’s actually not that simple. There are a lot of people terrified over the prospect of a balanced budget. If you campaigned by promising your constituents that those federal dollars would keep flowing to them, then a balanced budget amendment is your worst nightmare. In addition, I’d wager there are a fair amount of big organizations making big money that would blanche at the prospect of a balanced budget.
There are a lot of people who stand to lose their ill-gotten gains. They will not give them up easily or just because it’s the right thing to do. They will do everything in their power to protect their plunder at the expense of everyone else.
So it won’t be a cake-walk.
We cannot afford to send an inexperienced Senator into this fight. Orrin Hatch has 36 years worth of experience. He knows the system. He knows the people. He knows the game. He has seniority. He knows a fair bit about passing an Amendment to balance the budget. He will be the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. In 1997 he came within one vote of passing the BBA. One vote away from stopping cold the increases to our debt. If one Senator hadn’t “changed his mind” from Yea to Nay after a “chat” with the union leaders who helped him get elected then we would have had a balanced budget for the last 15 years.
He has sponsored or cosponsored the BBA 17 times. There is no one alive today who has more direct experience with this issue. With probable conservative majorities in the House and Senate and the prospect of a fiscally sane President in the Oval Office, we stand with our faces fixed on a golden opportunity. With, as President Reagan called him, Mr. Balanced Budget representing the great state of Utah in the U.S. Senate I believe the BBA can be passed.
So you want me to believe voting for Orrin Hatch will bring us into a magical utopia where there is no debt, crime or sadness and where Redbox always has the movie you want?
No, that would be silly. My point here is that instead of continuing to argue endlessly over finding the perfect Hail-Mary play to pull us out of this economic mess in one easy step we should probably consider the idea doing the sensible thing. A complex task is made easier when you divide it up into smaller tasks and simply begin immediately with the first thing on that list. The first thing on our list needs to be balancing our budget. Let’s do that and then go from there.
Look, I’ll be honest.
I work for Orrin Hatch, and maybe 7-15 percent of the time I disagree with his decisions. He’s not perfect. He has some bad votes. He’s cast thousands of them, so a perfect score would actually frighten me a bit and raise serious questions about the possibility of sentient synthetic humaniform robots a la’ Asimov novels. He’s not the perfect man for the job, but he is definitely the best option we have.
At the end of the day he has done much more good than bad. If he is really as terrible as out-of-state-groups-who-spend-more-than-half-a-million-dollars-to-sway-an-election would have you believe, then why has Utah voted to reelect him time and time again? We have reelected him because he is good for the economy and because he is an honest man. We vote him back because he stands up for Hill Air Force Base and because he carried Justice Clarence Thomas over the finish line and into the Supreme Court. Utahns respect Orrin Hatch because he fights for our right to own the land within our borders and manage the energy resources under our feet. We vote for Orrin Hatch because he has been, is now and will continue to be, an asset to our state and to our nation.
4 paragraphs, 4 stories
A website I'm a big fan of has a subsection devoted to writing complete fiction stories in just one paragraph. These are the four of mine I like best.
They say:
They say your mind maintains consciousness for 30 seconds after you're beheaded. 30 seconds is enough to curse like a sailor, but only in your mind, and spend the next bit morbidly curious and scientifically expectant. They say a lot of things, but I won't know for sure until these 30 seconds are up.
A soul so tarnished ain’t worth much.
He sat with sweaty palms and an amateur poker face as he listened to the call. “Yes, I thought as much. I’ll let him know.” The swarthy man with gleaming eyes, who he wouldn’t have pegged as a demon, hung up the phone. “I spoke with my supervisor. He said you can have the promotion, the girl or the long life, but not all three. Frankly a soul as tarnished as yours is likely to end up with us anyway, so this would just be us hedging our bets.” The demon waved his hand across the desk and three contracts appeared. He reached out to hand the man a glittering gold fountain pen, which he took out of instinct rather than by design. “Just make your choice and sign on the dotted line.“
You had to rewind it with a pencil?
What’s a cassette tape? The children will ask, when I explain to them how I wooed their mother. Why didn’t you just send her a link to the playlist? As confusion comes across their faces. They won’t understand how I sat with the radio on for weeks, the tape at the ready so as to record at an instant if one of the songs happened to come on. They won’t be able to fathom the frantic dash to hit the red button before the opening notes were lost to the whims of a DJ. And it’s true their way is more convenient, but when I gave her that tape and wallowed in her smile as she played it, it meant something they will never understand.
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!
The U.S.S Heinlein boosts for Alpha Centauri today. We are frightened. Curious. Excited. It’s a funny feeling, stepping into the unknown. It’s euphoric to know we will be the first 57 people to visit another solar system. But the thought of leaving the forward fuel base on Titan is terrifying. Who knows what peril awaits us on the unexplored edge of space? We said our goodbyes in January, but even though the FTL drive means all we know will be dead when we return, we are only allotted one paragraph of text to relay home. Here I’ve squandered it with thoughts and details, but the only message I truly cared to send is: I love you, and I’m sorry.
Baloney
He watched her hands shake as she made him his sandwich. Little globs of mustard flecked the counter where the knife had trembled on its way to its Wonder bread-resting place. It had taken her almost 30 seconds to open the jar this morning, her hands were definitely getting worse.
Luke felt like he should say something, but what does a ten year old say?
He looked up when the fridge opened, watched his mother pull a strand of dark hair away from her face as she scoured the inside for sandwich material.
Luke waited with held in breath. They had run out of cheese 3 days ago, and yesterday’s sandwich was a pitiful pile of what was left of the baloney. She must have forgotten. She forgot a lot of things, but if he reminded her she got angry. Last month she had slapped him so hard his face went numb, and he had to lie to his teacher later that day.
“I know we need to get gas before we leave for school. You think I don’t know how to take care of my children? You think like your daddy and the State that I can’t raise my boy!” He had cowered then, put his arms in front of his face to block other slaps and the smell of tequila.
Her curses, though she did her best to mumble them, pulled him out of the past and into the present. He heard her moving Tupperware around with more urgency and then the sound of an empty milk carton being lifted, shaken and replaced. The rattling got louder as her search become frantic, and then angry. Finally the din ended and he could see her body stiffen in frustration. He watched her name tag, a dull bit of metal emblazoned with Barbara and the logo of the all-night diner on it, move up and down as she took a deep, calming breath.
He had to head her off. Had to prevent an explosion. She had just finished her 8-8 shift, and this was the most dangerous time. If she got angry he’d be late, if he made it to school at all, and it had already happened once this week.
“Momma..” he said quietly, “Momma, Bryan liked those cookies I took to school last week so much he said he would buy me school lunch this week.” This was a lie, but she did make excellent cookies and the indirect praise usually worked. “It’s hamburger day at the cafeteria, can I have school lunch today please?” It was hamburger day, but it wasn’t likely he’d be having one. But he’d rather go hungry than deal with an episode.
Her eyes flashed, softened and then grew cloudy. She shook, nodded and seemed about to cry as she turned to get the keys. “OK, but you know we don’t need no charity. I’ll make some more cookies for Bryan to take home sometime. Wrap up that bread and mustard in saran wrap, I’ll reuse it for tomorrows sandwich.”
Luke’s stomach dropped. No lunch today, and a soggy sandwich tomorrow if she remembered to buy food instead of just drinking herself into a stupor. He didn’t let it show, and he smiled at his mom with practiced deception, grateful to be on the way to school without any incident.
This piece was written in response to this writing challenge. The idea is to turn a making a sandwich scene into something more intense.