Oh, the sound of a band-aid ripping from the flesh of your arm smarts. The pain, most of the time, is soon gone and the memory soon fades. Have you ever pulled one off slowly though? Really slowly? You feel the same sharp pain, but you experience a prolonged agony, kind of like a bad marriage. I bring up these painful memories to expose to you that your government has chosen the latter course of action in dealing with the recession. The Team has chosen to borrow its way out of debt and spend its way out of poor fiscal responsibility and yet the pain ultimately shall come to bear. Indeed, the band-aid that we could go ahead and rip off today will one day become duct tape stuck to the arms of your children and grandchildren.

It is our generation that elected and re-elected the politicians that initiated this economic meltdown by compelling banks to loosen their lending standards. It is our generation that reaped the benefits of a bubble economy enabled by the Fed’s mismanagement of the money supply. And it is our generation that gave rise to the profiteers on Wall Street who gamed the system, spread the risk and reaped the rewards at the expense of our nation’s health.

It is our generation, then, that must shoulder the burden of this deep recession.

Locally, we must reject the misguidance of our national leaders and think and act for ourselves. To compete against other communities for state and federal stimulus funds to supplement our budgets is akin to pigs competing for slop in the trough just before the slaughter. Dependency on those funds will eventually work to the benefit of the providers, the farmers of collective compliance, never to the receivers. Our state and local identity is at stake.

Slice away everything in the budget that is not essential to our sustenance and protection. “Wants” no longer matter, only needs count now. Our leaders, political, religious, business, must redefine the term “age of responsibility” to mean what it should: personal responsibility for one’s actions, not collective responsibility to society, increasingly dependent on the efforts of a shrinking class of producers.

We must now be brave.

Sam Hancock is a resident of Cheraw. Contact him at SamHancock24@gmail.com