My name is Molly and I am an American robin. I learned to think by seeing myself in car door mirrors. I am a mother who has had several broods of hatchlings. A fellow wrote about my story in Animal Park. He only got half the story right as most people do. I use public school libraries which are often closed. I usually find windows or openings into schools. I only have to perch on a tree or bush or deck to watch television news, which is hardly worth the trouble most of the time.

I landed in the patio of a retiree who has a lush garden with many delicacies. There was a tablet of paper on a table and I read what she had written. I heard her on the telephone talking very passionately about politics and she said that she would like to write a column for a newspaper because she had never done it. So here are her words, an American retiree, a teacher with thirty-one years in the educational system:

"What we have here in the United States of America is our very own political royalty who ride in luxury limousines to luxury homes sometimes on government planes to luxury hotels at luxury resorts and back to the luxury limousines to one of their luxury homes where they feast on the finest organic free range meats, seafood, and the finest and freshest organic vegetables and beautiful fruits few of us citizens can afford.

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As a taxpaying citizen standing in line for everything, standing in line at the airport, at the supermarket, at the DMV, waiting at the doctor’s office, waiting and standing in line while the political royalty whose salaries we pay live another kind of luxury life. A life of privilege which I cannot afford. I only pay them so they can afford it without using their own money.

Meanwhile, for the actual job I pay them to do, which is to make laws to keep us free and safe seems to be lost somewhere. Let’s see, roads, bridges, trains, unsafe lakes, rivers and drinking water polluted, cities crime ridden, industry jobs outsourced. Household products foreign made, a question about my credit card takes me to a foreign land. My groceries, fruits and vegetables are mostly imports. What we can’t grow our own grapes or broccoli anymore? We can’t make a wrench, a wreath or a towel anymore.

Crimes in the public schools have increased when they should have decreased 20 years ago. The obscenities on TV and the movies have become commonplace and accepted. This is our America today."

The superstate that has been created in your country is for the benefit primarily of those in the national government, lobbyists and the industries the lobbyists represent, often to the detriment to the majority of the American people. A new slogan has emerged for the republic: A country for the few, by the few but of the many. They have taken to calling Medicare and Social Security entitlements, which are really necessary government services while almost everything else in the government, including their perks and privileges are nothing more than “entitlements.”

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August 5, 2010