Don’t give someone a fish, teach him how to fish. Reform education; teach people life skills, how to be positive, and believe in themselves.
Focus on Americanism. Let’s define ourselves by who we really are, not by who we aren’t. Israel and Iran are a hair-trigger away from a hot war; we all know what that would do to gasoline prices.
These and other motivational topics were sent spinning resoundingly around Huntley Park District’s REC Center cafeteria last week by two speakers delivering talks to the Huntley Area Tea Party.
Revving up for the national presidential and local political campaigns this fall, about 150 Tea Party-ers got a lot of ideas and stem-winding from Dan Proft, talk show host on WLS radio in Chicago, and Steve Beaman, an economist and principal of the Steve Beaman Group, a business-coaching and consulting firm. This was the first of several fall activities planned by the local Tea Party group leading up to election day November 6. A significant chunk of the audience was made up of Sun City residents.
Both speakers aimed occasional barbs at the Obama Administration and Democrats but focused for the most part on conservative philosophies and themes of freedom, liberty, free enterprise, free markets, and smaller government.
“We need to stop being negative and define ourselves by who we are, not who we are not,” said Proft. “We are not being compelling enough. The genius of ex-President Ronald Reagan was that he repeatedly defined for the world his core values that drove all of his policies and decisions. We all had a good sense of his core beliefs. We need to get back to that today.”
He suggested five principles for the 2012 election campaigns: 1. Don’t make promises we can’t keep, so we can keep all our promises.
2. We need to be the party that keeps families together.
“We send most of our high school graduates out of state to go to college, and they don’t come back,” Prof said. “We are sending our best and brightest young people away from our state.”
3. We need to reward the things we want to see more of and stop rewarding the things we want to see less of.
4. We need to align government with the interests of its citizens.
“We tell people that smoking is bad, so stop,” he said. “Then we turn around and tell them to smoke because we need the money from the cigarette tax to pay our bills. It’s the same problem with gambling and home ownership. We tell people to buy homes and drop down roots in a community. Then we say we may have to seize the home or raise property taxes to pay the pension debt of others.”
5. We need to take care of the truly vulnerable because that’s what we do in a civilized society.
“We have become barbaric in an agenda of building big government,” Proft said. “I can think of no bigger indictment of our nation.”
He said the solution is a grass-roots effort by average citizens to develop ideas together.
Beaman focused on educational reform and developing life skills in young people. He sounded “catastrophic” warnings about the nation’s debt and what he described as educational failures, but he also stressed optimism over people’s ability to solve the country’s problems.
“I really believe that we can make the decade of 2012-2022 a resurgent time in our nation if each one of us changes the way we operate,” he said.
“Too many people don’t know enough about their own or the government’s finances,” Beaman added. “They can’t develop a retirement program, figure how to pay for the kids’ education, or how to build a good credit score.
“I’m an economist, I judge and understand things in terms of numbers,” Beaman said. “We are $16 trillion in debt, and we add $1.1 trillion to that number annually. Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare cost us $65 billion annually; there is not that much money available to pay this cost. Our debt situation is catastrophic. The Middle East is in flames. Israel and Iran are a hair trigger away from a hot war. We all know what will happen to oil and gasoline prices if that happens.”
Having said that, however, he then sounded a hopeful note. “It will take a lot of hard work, but I believe we can solve these problems through individual action leading to group action.”
