This is not a perfect 10.

I hope reporters Susan Snyder and Rita Girodano, from my hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, don't think that I am fooled. I read their latest article about a family who moved to Philadelphia from New York, and it was disguised as a piece about dealing with the oppressive heat here in the city. But come on now......folks, please go to the link, read the article, and come back to my post.

Did you read it? Good. Okay I will bite, I don't want to, but I must, because I have to keep it 100% with you folks. Cynthia King is 37 years old (unless there is a typo in there somewhere) and she has TEN yes I wrote TEN children. All from ages 5-19. Notice how the reporter made sure her age and the number of kids she has got into the story? There is a reason for that. This story isn't about a family coping with the heat wave. It's about this woman with no job, no support from a significant other, and having to depend on Catholic charities to get by with TEN children.

Now I rarely talk about my day job, because one, I don't want to lose it, and two, as an attorney, I have a certain obligation to the people I serve and I am guided by certain rules and an oath that prevents me from disclosing certain things. But if I told you that in my fifteen years of working in this business, I have seen and dealt with 27 year old grandmothers, 26 year old mothers with seven children, sperm donors who see themselves as lotharios fathering as much as twelve children with eight different women, being prosecuted for child support for all of them, and yet not one single dime is collected because they have no job; would you believe me?

Of course you wouldn't. You would think that just I made the shit all up for effect right? Just to make this story a little more interesting and to drive home my point.

Sooo.....do you believe Susan Snyder and Rita Giordano's story, or do you think they just threw in Ms. King's age and the number of kids she has for dramatic effect?

I was just wondering. Hey, you folks who comment here are a lot smarter than I am, so maybe one of you will have the answer as to why this type of shit happens, because I sure as hell don't. I mean, well, I have some ideas, but what did Jack Nicholson's character, Nathan R. Jessep say again? Oh yeah, "you can't handle the truth".

"Better truth than flattery"

I read a great article from Jay Bookman today, in my hometown paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, which is cut and paste worthy. I know the A-merry-ca love it or leave it crowd won't like it, but the truth hurts sometimes.

Sorry, unlike the rest of the folks here in A-merry-ca; I don't like my leaders to be like Pamela Anderson's breasts. Fake! So I co-sign with Mr. Bookman's thesis 100%.

Here goes:

"We Americans have a high regard for ourselves. We are - or so we tell ourselves - the richest, the most generous, the most powerful, the most peace-loving, the most productive, the most wise, and the most lovable nation on the face of the earth.

We also love politicians who dare to tell us all those wonderful things about ourselves. Like any people, we want to think well of our country and take pride in it, and we want leaders who take pride in it as well.

But there's a difference between justified pride and illusion.
Too many Americans seem to believe that our place in the world has been divinely ordained and thus permanent, when in fact it is the product of past sacrifice and wise choices. It can all be lost if we also lose the capacity to look at ourselves and our problems honestly.

It is no longer true, for example, that we are the richest nation in the world. Quite the contrary, in recent years we have become the world's biggest debtor nation. We are financing our prosperity in the manner of an old but declining aristocratic family, living beyond our means year by year by pawning off the assets earned by earlier generations.

But our leaders don't dare tell us that truth, because they know we wouldn't take it well. Even as they acknowledge some minor current difficulties, most of our political and business leaders reassure us that our economy is still sound as a dollar. They don't happen to point out that compared with the euro, the value of that dollar has declined by a third in just the last five years.

Yes, we remain productive, but that too cannot last if our government is too poor to invest sufficiently in our public infrastructure. Our roads, bridges, rail lines and ports are crumbling and insufficient in a modern economy, but we decline to tax ourselves to correct that situation. Our nation's Highway Trust Fund - the main source of infrastructure investment - will be bankrupt by 2009, yet we refuse to increase gasoline taxes to replenish that account.

Officially, we tell ourselves we can't afford it. Meanwhile we ship fortunes to oil producers overseas, where the money is put to such useful and productive purposes as building ski resorts in the Arabian desert.

There are no easy answers to $4 gasoline, but our leaders are nonetheless eager to offer a few. Some choose to bash the oil companies, as if they are at fault for our addiction to their product. Others suggest suspending the federal gasoline tax, which would slightly and temporarily ease our pain at the gas pump but do nothing whatsoever to cure the underlying disease.

President Bush, for his part, suggests drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, yet another seemingly pain-free solution. But we could drain the wildlife refuge of every single drop of oil it might hold and it would not lower the price of gasoline a nickel. Nor would it alter our strategic situation in any meaningful way.

Four hundred years ago, an English writer-philosopher offered great advice to a counselor to King James I. Always tell the king the truth, Sir Francis Bacon wrote in a letter to his friend. Tell the king what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear.

'If you flatter him, you betray him,' Bacon warned. "If you conceal the truth of those things from him . . . you are as dangerous a traitor to this state as he that riseth in arms against him."

A lot of things have changed since Bacon's time. In this country, We the People are now king, but Bacon's truth still applies. Those advisers and courtiers who flatter us also betray us.
Instead of flattery, we need honesty. We don't need leaders to tell us how great we are, we need leaders willing to tell us that we've gotten ourselves into a bad mess and it's going to take hard work, sacrifice and cooperation to fix it. The alternative is the decline of a great nation.
Or, as a writer-philosopher named Bob Dylan once put it:
'If it keeps on raining, the levee's gonna break;
Some people still sleepin', some people wide awake'."

Shit, pass me the Ambien please.

[Link here.]