Put Your Dreams Away

Put your dreams away/for another day/And I will take their place in your heart/Wishing on a star never got you far/And so it’s time to make a new start – Frank Sinatra, Put Your Dreams Away, 1945.

In campaigning for his job recovery legislation, Obama claimed that, “if we don't move swiftly to put this plan in motion, our economic crisis could become a national catastrophe. Millions of Americans will lose their jobs, their homes, and their health care.  Millions more will have to put their dreams on hold.

“From the beginning, this recovery plan has had at its core a simple idea: Let's put Americans to work doing the work America needs done. It will save or create more than 3 million jobs over the next two years, all across the country - 16,000 in Maine, nearly 80,000 in Indiana - almost all of them in the private sector, and all of them jobs that help us recover today, and prosper tomorrow.”

He fails to mention of course that it is the taxpayers’ money supporting all these “private sector” jobs.  Thanks to the Democrats and their Moderate Republican sycophants, we were plunged into this economic disaster, one long in the making, ever since the Community Reinvestment Act from the Jimmy Carter era.

Instead of wishing on a star, the American people are forced to wish upon the government.  Like some fairy godmother in a fairy tale, Obama thinks Nancy Pelosi can just wave her magic wand and print up magical money.  Soon, the U.S. dollar is going to be about as valuable as Monopoly money.

When I was little, my father took me to the library to hear stories about leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day.  We took a walk in the park, where there was a little pond.  Peering through the grass, I saw with my childish eyes one of the green-clad elves, no higher than a blade of grass.

“Aha!” I cried.  “I’ve caught you!  Now you have to give me your pot of gold!”

“Oh now, just a minute now, little girly,” he said nervously, as I backed him up against the tree.  “There are rules.  If you want my pot o’gold, you have to catch me first and you can’t take your eyes off me!”  As I reached for the imp and his little pot of gold, I heard a heavy footstep in the underbrush; my father was coming.

I made the mistake of turning my head.  When I looked back, the leprechaun – and his gold-filled pot - were gone.  A frog croaked nearby and splashed into the water.  That’s what the storyteller had said – that leprechauns could transform into animals to escape capture.

“I just saw a leprechaun!  I almost got his pot of gold,” I cried, but my father tushed.

“There’s no such thing as leprechauns,” he said.  “You were just imagining things. If you want a pot of gold in this life, you’re just going to have to earn it for yourself.”

‘And not rob little green men of what belongs to them,’ I guiltily reproved myself.  Had I just demonstrated how greedy and wicked I was, coveting someone else’s property?

There’s a time when you have to grow up and stop believing in leprechauns and the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin (though not Santa Claus –he’s a special case).  You have to grow up and believe in yourself, your abilities, and your country.  If you want to succeed, you have to believe in freedom and capitalism.  You have to believe in America, not the fairy tale with which Obama, the Democrats, and Moderate Republicans have deceived us.