A Bottle of Life

Here in America, because we all seem to have so much, we take so much for granted. It’s not our fault, it’s just the way it is and we earned it.
This past week we couldn’t help but watch the mass destruction and suffering of the Haitian people after an earthquake left their country in ruins. This is a country where the people themselves are their own worst enemy. One feels so sorry for them, mainly because they cannot take care of themselves and most of them don’t know how.
We’ve all arrived back at the pickup on a hot day and looked around for a bottle of water. When there was one left under the seat, we thought it was ok but not the best it could have been. It saved us for the moment, or until we got home for a “frosty treat,” and it wasn’t life or death.
This past week in Haiti, it was life or death. A bottle of water saved numerous children.  What we all take for granted here in America has been in the past week a bottle of life to a child or an elderly person – the innocent ones in the devastation.
Last year Americans spent over $11 billion on over eight billion gallons of bottled water. Then we tossed over 22 billion empty plastic bottles in the trash. We consumed more than 70 million bottles of water each day in the U.S. and it took over 1.5 million barrels of oil to produce the plastic bottles in the course of one year. I wonder how many cubic yards of crushed plastic bottles go into our landfills every day? Another surprising fact is that over 40 percent of bottled water started out as the same tap water we get at home. It all goes back to convenience, doesn’t it?
Hey, how about the Senate race in Massachusetts this past week? It couldn’t have come at a better time. There certainly will be some interesting stories coming out of Washington, D.C. in upcoming weeks. 
The right to vote is one of America’s greatest rights for true freedom, another one of those issues we take for granted. The wayward course of Congress was changed overnight and not a shot was fired. Hopefully all in Congress have learned the citizens of this country will only take so much closed-door politics, and this was just the first step in cleaning House and Senate.
Some back East are saying the Democrats didn’t run a good campaign or didn’t have the right person for the job, which is “bunk.” The issues of closed-door politics, health care, cap and trade, overspending and taxing and buying votes is what defeated the Democratic candidate. The independents and disgruntled Democrats who wanted to send a message to Washington won the election. The Republicans and all members of Congress need to remember the intensity of anger toward Washington the voters in Massachusetts felt. We in Wyoming need to remember that if the whole country had listened to Wyoming’s Congressional delegation, we wouldn’t have been in this fix.
Dennis