We were so poor when I was a boy it sometimes seemed unreal. Outhouses, well water drawn with a bucket and eating what you raised. None of this outweighed the good in our lives. What was good was that we were together – my mom and dad, my sister and brother and my grandmother. When we moved into the small three bedroom Jim Walter home in 1965 I thought we’d hit the jackpot. Before long I had a total of nine siblings. Still, nothing outweighed the good.
Looking at life through that prism, I see the current federal government shutdown as a clear indication that the bad outweighs the good. I spent more than three decades of my adult life in service to my country – military and civilian service. I served under both Democratic and Republican administrations enforcing federal law – including drugs, transnational gangs and immigration violations.
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