By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
MARCH 4, 2025 | Think of a complex machine going about its paces, humming along beautifully. It might be an internal combustion engine, with its many moving parts speeding you along the roadway. It might be as simple as a vacuum cleaner, scooping up dust and grime. Or it might be a complicated bottler spurting Coca-Cola into glass bottles or cans on an assembly line, then even packaging them, ready for shipment.
But drop even a paper clip into most any machine, and it might as well be a monkey wrench. Everything stops because you dropped this object among those moving parts. The machine stops, no longer running smoothly.
Mankind has developed these machines to solve many of its everyday tasks to make it easier on us. It has taken ages to get to this point to help our society function.
Have you ever thought of our American way of life as a giant machine? Consider our country of 340 MILLION people, spread across this vast nation, all going about our lives, and dependent on one another in our daily living.
Our food goes through many cycles before it is placed before us, from field, to processor, to the trucker, to our supermarkets. All along the way, small incidents might interfere which could halt food getting to our table. Yet somehow, it gets here, on time. Think of how many people and the twists and turns involved before we consume it!
Recognize that all this takes place within a framework of free enterprise system and government. Our entire nation churns along with no central figure directing it.
It is really amazing. It’s nothing less than continual just-in-time delivery every day. We never think about it, but as vast as it is, it is a well-oiled system, coasting along with no conductor.
Yet something is amiss today that seeks to abruptly disrupt this vital national system and our people. The Trump Administration seeks to throw monkey wrench after monkey wrench into first one element after another of our well-worn and dependable American governmental system.
You can’t keep a country going when you undermine its inner workings of industry, or of government. You can’t fire people who provide framework and internal functioning and expect matters to continue like normal. You can’t blindly undercut the financial welfare of people by taking away the Social Security they have paid into. (That’s not just unfair. It’s larceny.) You can’t insult the other countries of the world and not expect payback.
Americans should demand better. We can’t allow third-rate newcomers to government, many even without experience in our systems, to try to thrust their untested ideas upon a nation which has hummed along nicely for over 250 years.
While this machine of government has safeguards built in, it will take steadfast, tough men and women in the Congress and in the judiciary to stand up and defy a wild president, and show him our country is not his kingdom.
So far this hasn’t happened. Congress and the judiciary must protect our system, and must move soon, or else our time-honored experiment in reprehensive democracy may be doomed. It must happen sooner or later, or our nation is down the tubes.
We’ll look forward to returning to our quieter days of a smoothly-running republic without monkey wrenches being thrown in, which will eventually return us to normal, and relieve us of the antics of a madman.
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