Actually, anyone who has read my past posts knows that I am an unabashed and proud progressive! I just get a kick out of people misrepresenting the words "socialism" or "fascism" just to inflame a talking point.

I firmly belive that goverment has a role to play in providing universals that not everyone can access- and I am proud to pay more taxes if necessary to provide better services. That includes education, police fire, roads and safety, as well as a minimum of quality health care, Veteran's care, and dignity for seniors.

We pay our amenity fees in The Villages- they are taxes- and yet don't begrudge the possibility that the Morses may owe hundreds of millions of dollars in shady tax exempt shelters. As I've said before, taxes are the country club fee you pay to live in the greatest nation in the world. Our priorities are different than other nations, and SOME individuals have the choice to move, but the vast majority have no choice or desire to move. Yet their attempt at change is viewed by the narroe-minded as threatening or unAmerican.

But millions of Americans cannot simply say "Oh, I'll choose my own health care plan" simply because the health care industry, making obscene profits, isn't interested in insuring individuals. Why is it fine for the head of United Health to make $139 million dollars a year (2005), but then you complain about Medicare being wasteful?

Many Villagers are totally out of touch with the mainstream of this nation. We live in a wonderful middle-class fantasy world. We cheer Oliver North's patriotism, even though he sold 1000 stinger missiles to Iran AFTER the hostage crisis. We cheer Anne Coulter even as she calls for genocide, murdering college students and blowing up newspaper buildings. We crow about Republicans being the party of "family values" even as hypocrite after hypocrite gets caught with his zipper down- gay and straight. (Democrats do it just as much- but they don't get all self-righteous about it towards others!)

We listen to radicals like Joe Angione, Ruthie Kelly and Rush Limbaugh use coded anti-semetic language (Intellectuals, socialists, bankers and elitists are all words the Nazis used to label Jews) and then "tsk, tsk," when white supremisists act out on their hateful cheerleading.

So as a baby-boomer, I am PROUD to pay taxes, Proud of my country and her values. I am ashamed, however of how many of the "Korean" generation do a dis-service to "The Greatest Generation" and the current generations by engaging in nothing but navel-gazing anger toward anything that doesn't resemble "life" like "Father Knows Best" or "Leave it to Beaver."

No matter how much you'd like to just bury your heads in the 13th hole of Hemmingway, there is a big world around us with huge, inhumane problems that need to be worked on.

Enjoy this great life, but don't assume it's available to "anyone" who works hard enough to get it. Life doesn't work that way, and our system ahs become only more and more skewed to favor those of us who start with money in the first place.