First rule of thumb...politics and religion are not good topics in the work place. Yeah, we all have freedom of speech but it is a fact of life that both these topics are subject to heated arguments do to different perceptions and beliefs and discussing them where you work or do business many times will only end up causing anomosity among folks that have to spend a good portion of their life everyday working together. Just my opinion.

More of my opinion. This country is not perfect. No country ever has been. Our country was founded on the principle of government for the people, by the people.....and people are not perfect...we make mistakes...and hopefully learn from these mistakes and take positive actions to correct the mistakes we have made. Being only human, we are all influenced by the economic, social and cultural environments that we grew up with. America has been a melting pot of people from all over the world that have differing views do to these differences. But, we all have one thing in common...and that is the love of freedom and the perception that it is better to govern ourselves than to be governed by the influencial few. What has made our country a place that so many people want to come live here is the fact that here in America everyone can feel relatively safe, have enough food to eat and have a chance to better one's station in life without fear of reprucusion from a government that is not answerable to the people governed. In order to maintain this standard in an ever evolving world decisions have to be made that will never please everyone because of our differing perceptions. Since we have the freedoms we so much love and have sacrificed for....we have open controversy on what directions we need to take in order to preserve our way of life and improve our futures.

During most of our history as a country the people have been able to find a common middle ground and work together to solve our problems for the good of the majority. Unfortunately, we as a country and people have become divided over the past 30 or 40 years to the point now that the majority of the people are either on the far left of center or the far right of center with neither willing to compromise for the good of the whole. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, but in my opinion this has been caused mainly with the advent of big money special interest groups on both the left and right that have been able to buy our governmental representatives to the point that our govenmental representives have become their puppets not only at the federal level but all the way down to local government. It is my opinion that we no longer as a people are voting for the best leader, but we are voting for the best puppet.

There was only one other time in our history that the people of this country was so much divided....and that was just before the civil war....the cost to correct this division was terribly high in both life and economics. My question I pose to you is, are we as a people going to correct this current situation of division by finding a way to take back the control of our government from the special interest groups or are we going to continue to feed this cancer that is eventually going to own us and our freedoms to serve their own greed until our children and grand children have no future. If you wonder just who these special interest groups are and who is backing them....you don't have to look far...they are multi national corporate with ties to many other governments in the world...which have no stake at all in our way of life and could care less what happens to us and our freedom as long as they are making money and futhering their own futures.

One last comment: I spent 26 years in the military serving my country and the people here. I did not do that so that I could say that I have more rights than any other person in this country to freedom of speech or any of the other liberties our constitution provides for. Soldiers serve where and when they are ordered to do so. Being a soldier does not necessarily mean you are in total agreement with what you have to do to perform the mission the government has ordered you to do. Fact is, soldiers spend their time in harm's way trying to survive and help their fellow soldier's survive...they do not spend their time spouting political propaganda from one point of view or another...they have more important things to do.