I’m not a party affiliate

Matt Pearl

I get asked fairly frequently why I chose to be a Republican. My

answer: I didn’t—and I’m not one.

Party affiliations begin with people of likeminded idealogies forming a group to protect the interests they hold to be important. Party affiliations end with people following the group, regardless of the stupidity asserted by those in power.

Go ahead and tell me with a straight face that a Democrat from the 1940s would truly identify with the party today. That’s not a criticism: it’s a fact that the passage of time changes partisan politics.

Party platforms mean nothing after a few years of power anyway. Can you tell me Richard Nixon was a conservative, when all the man did was expand government? How about Bush I or Bush II? Both of them had the spending sickness that continues to plague our society.

Kennedy would be an awful Democrat in 2015, and Ford could never have withstood the Tea Party retaliation he would have received if he had applied his policies in today’s political climate.

So if inconsistency and change surround the political parties, why do we spend so much time watching their every move? Why not refocus our energy on doing what is right, instead of what’s left or right?

Have you voted recently to elect

a person that couldn’t operate

without his or her party’s agenda within reach at all times? Then you voted for a person none of us

should respect.

And I’m tired of it, and you should be, too. Every problem that arises in this nation meets with two politicized, biased solution choices from politicians: usually to spend or to spend more. Start a program here. Promise funding there. Reassure Americans that their every interest and desire can be met—until budget balancing time comes, and then act outraged that spending is so out-of-control.

Watch Greece crumble under the weight of mathematically impossible promises for pension incentives that a government made its people—promises that politicans used to buy votes, but will bring a nation’s economic collapse. Watch it. Go ahead. Those demonstrations in Athens will happen on the streets of New York and Los Angeles, Chicago and

Detroit if we continue to take the same path as Greece.

And we reduce it all to conservatism and liberalism. We act like one party takes on one idealogy, while the other party grabs onto the other, as if the values of an economic

system belonged wholly to one school of thought or another.

Here’s the fact that I may share with you freely, because I am not running for office and don’t need for everyone to love me:

All the people can’t have everything they want all the time, and no political promise can reverse this truth.

Sorry. I know it’s tough. We’re not used to being patient in this country, and we certainly aren’t used to doing without something once we see that our neighbors have it.

I don’t have everything I want right now. I never will. My hope for the political system in this country

is simple: I hope that my govern-ment leaves me enough personal

liberty to continue to pursue freely my personal and economic goals. I can’t reverse the policies that others have enacted. I do pray that Washington DC leaves me something

upon which I can build. Because when an American cannot grow through hard work and determination, we are truly lost.