The Vanishing America.

We used to take summer vacations when I was a kid. Unfortunately I didn’t realize how much that I enjoyed those trips until much later in life. When I became a horse trainer I had the opportunity to travel around America again. Small towns, farming towns, oilfield towns, Americana at it’s best. When I became a territory sales rep. I continued to travel around and see the United States. Recently I’ve taken another trip halfway across America and I’ve noticed some very disturbing trends. The America that I thought I knew and remembered is vanishing.

America is a beautiful country and it is slipping away right in front of us. Small towns are literally dying and disappearing right before our eyes. I traveled the back roads and secondary highways on my recent trips and good hardworking Americans are losing their businesses everywhere. Beautiful small town buildings are standing empty. Lonely and forlorn looking for new tenants. Some falling into disrepair and turning into empty monuments to what was once great about America. Small town churches are empty. There are no parishoners to sit in the pews on Sundays. Old car dealerships once majestic and exciting with full glass fronts filled with the latest in automotive splendor are sitting empty. Occupied only by memories and dust. I can only imagine what outstanding restaurants and local dress shops they would make. America was once a country of manufacturers, small town machinists shops and sporting goods stores, florists and grocers. It is the place we need to be again. There are brilliant people in America. Internet access gives them the power to communicate with the world. Banks need to start investing in the real American, instead of putting all their interest in a housing and real estate market that is largely hollow investments and manufactured values. We are building some of the best quality cars in the world again. America started the internet revolution and it’s time that we used it to our advantage.

There are hard working Americans in these small towns, and they are fighters.

They are fighting the economy, fighting to keep the family farm alive, the family diary, tire shops and gas stations with small town mechanics hoping for a good holiday travel season so they can afford to pay the bills the rest of the year. They work 16 hour days for $12.00/hour or less. Show up every day rain or shine and keep us Americans rolling. They work in the oilfields carrying 85# chains and hot oily pipe. Pumping salt water and smelling sulphur all day long. At the end of the day they go home to solid homes to their wives and children. There are some beautiful old motels that should be remodeled and returned back to their former glory, who says staying at a big motel chain is the way to go. Some of the most popular motel chains in the United States aren’t even owned by Americans. I mean American companies. There are plenty of American owned motels that are struggling to survive.

I think it’s time that we started to take back our country and our economy. Use our collective voices and buying power. Write our congressmen, our newspapers, our t.v. stations and demanded that we pass legislation that supports and promotes American owned businesses. We can’t tax our way out of this depression. We need to industrialize our country again, build and invent and produce our way back into the worlds leading economy. We have the power to educate ourselves out of this mess that we are in. We have the natural resources available to produce the best products in the world. We need to bring our manufacturing jobs back home. Irregardless of pricing. If we build a better product, there will be demand, and that means proper wages and incomes. We need to buy American. If we were to produce and buy products made right here we could support our own economy. We don’t have to increase our exports although that would be great too, but producing goods made right here in American would go a long way to reducing our trade deficit. We need to make our own tennis shoes, boots, under wear. We produce cotton right here in farming regions all across the southwest. We should be producing cotton garment here instead of shipping the raw materials off to some foreign country to be processed and manufactured and then shipped back here for our consumption.

The European countries have higher tax rates than ours and their economies are struggling just as ours or worse. They are fighting their governments, their banks, and each other just to stay afloat.