Train Wreck

 

Note: To listen to this blog on KWON/KYFM radio go to http://www.bartlesvilleradio.com/caffeine/uploads/files/ON%20Demand/Ideas%20Matter/Ideas%20Matter%203-7.mp3 .  If you are interested in Dr. Piper’s new book Why I Am a “Liberal” and Other Conservative Ideas go to www.whyiamaliberal.com or www.everettpiper.com .

 

Several times in the past I have said that ideas always lead somewhere. Like the train in the Christmas movie The Polar Express, good ideas lead to good places full of magic, wonder, and beauty; and like the train chugging across the foothills of the Black Forest in Schindler’s List, bad ideas always lead to bad places such as the furnaces of Dachau and Auschwitz.

 

Ideas, just like trains, are directional—they always lead somewhere.

 

Well, this past week the Obama Administration announced that it wants to spend $56 billion to buy a train—a high-speed rail service—that over the next 25 years will cost a total of $800 billion to maintain and expand!

 

As my friend Chuck Colson says, “This is sheer madness… At a time when several state governments are teetering on the verge of economic collapse…and the nation’s credit rating is sinking into the abyss… [It’s] time for the government to pare back exactly as the American people have told them to do... Now is the time for our representative leaders to grow up and ask what is necessary and what is a luxury, not to ask what can buy votes…!”

 

Colson concludes: “[Let’s] boil it down so even Congress can understand it. Excessive debt: bad. Living within our means: good.”

 

I might add this: Not only is this a colossal waste of money, but it is symbolic of the ideological “train wreck” of a culture that has totally lost its way. As spending financial capital on a bad train is a bad idea so too is spending moral capital on so many other bad ideas that are likewise taking us down the tracks of our own destruction.

 

Perhaps now is the time to call your congressman before the train leaves the station.