I’M HEADING HOME after a week of driving around in California and Oregon on some of the best highways and across some of the most spectacular bridges in the world.  I’ve trudged through pristine wilderness, walked along well-kept sidewalks in safe, stable towns, and stopped at rest areas and information centers for guidance about what and how to see some of the most admired scenery on earth. Schools have opened for another year and have begun again to provide American young people with some of the best education in the world.  I drove today on an interstate highway that took me very close to beautiful Mount Shasta, a sight that a majority of Americans will live a whole lifetime without ever seeing.  I could go on naming the facilities and services I use regularly which are bought with the taxes my fellow citizens and I have paid, but the list would soon become much too long for this BLOG writing. 

WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND is why some of the people I know who are enjoying regularly the same facilities and services that are available to me are so obviously dissatisfied with the government that makes our good life possible.  Why do so many people who have all the advantages, who make use of public resources, who live the good life keep on bitching and whining... What is the basis for their complaint that the poor are costing the country too much?   The people who have been out and about in California and Oregon enjoying the resources I have been enjoying this past couple of weeks aren’t the poor. The one’s I’ve seen taking advantage of what government buys and maintains look a lot like me... and a lot like the people who say they hate government and want to shrink or destroy it.  Where’s the logic?