Pass the bill!

An open letter to the current members of Congress: OK, so you heard the President. Our country is laying off police and firemen, nurses, and teachers, closing schools and increasing class sizes. Students are learning in aging buildings that are in dire need of upkeep and upgrading for modern technology. How can we expect our children to compete in the new global economy when we can't even guarantee them a decent education with which to do so? Our infrastructure is crumbling. Where I live, there are aging bridges and crumbling roads that were not built to handle the amount of traffic they currently have traveling over them each and every day. I get tired of dodging the craters that appear every winter and spring because of our freeze and thaw cycles and watching roads I travel regularly become bumpier and more hazardous. In the 1960s we got rid of our passenger rail system after America fell in love with the personal automobile. Well, I suppose the upside of this is that a lot of old rail beds were converted into beautiful hiking trails with which to enjoy the scenery, but still, I remember the days when the railroads were extremely busy and traffic was regularly disrupted by trains rumbling through our town at predictable times every day. You could get almost anywhere by train in those days. Now, the nearest train station is, I think, in Cleveland, if memory serves, and only a few passenger trains per day go through and in the wee hours of the morning at that, so if you want to travel anywhere by train, you have to drive quite a distance to catch the nearest passenger train and be prepared to go without sleep so you can catch it in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, countries like China are building shiny, gleaming new rail terminals to accomodate their state of the art high speed rail systems, Europe has one of the most high quality highway systems in the world, and America's once proud infrastructure is crumbling while Congress bickers over dollars and cents. It makes no sense whatsoever, and the problem is that the likelihood of this bill passing is practically nonexistent because the radical insurgent TEA Party runs Congress right now and they aren't about to do ANYTHING that would help President Obama to further his agenda, even if it means that our country continues its slow downhill slide toward mediocrity. We'll continue to try to educate children in aging school buildings and ask teachers to take on more students than they have time to teach, drive our cars and trucks over crumbling roads and dangerously obsolete bridges and hope that nothing happens while so doing, we'll continue to rely on the personal automobile instead of high speed trains and with highways being clogged by more traffic than they were designed to handle, it's going to get worse as money to fix that situation will not be there, and more and more people will lose jobs and the economy is going to continue its downward death spiral into double digit unemployment numbers.....because the TEA Party wants to screw the President at the cost of helping a hurting country. Well, Congress, I have news for you: America is waking up to your stalling tactics. We'll have none of it. The number one thing we want right now is jobs, jobs, jobs, and this bill will do just that, it will help to create jobs, OK, maybe not enough to bring about an end to the recession, but right now, something is better than nothing, and dammit, Congress, we need this bill NOW. So get off of your political high horses and DO SOMETHING. Pass this bill, Congress, pass this bill. And do it NOW. We don't have the luxury of waiting 14 months until the next election. We need this bill and we need it NOW. So stop your quibbling, bickering and silly gamesmanship in continuing to hurt our country in order to make the President look bad. Enough. Act like adults and do the right thing: PASS THIS BILL. Are you listening to the American people, Congress? PASS THIS BILL. Comprende? PASS THIS BILL! Wakarimas-ka? PASS THIS BILL! Verstehen Sie? PASS THIS BILL! Comprenez-Vous? PASS THIS BILL! I don't know how many other ways I can phrase this, but dammit, PASS THIS BILL!!!!!