We Deserve A George W. Bush Holiday

By Steven Borne

I propose creating a George W. Bush Day — a national holiday, the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend to be the new national election day, instead of the first Tuesday in November.

This day will become a day of remembrance — a chance to avoid repeating the historic national mistakes of the past eight years. Our past generations have enabled our great nation to be divided, the balance of governmental power distorted, our national identity betrayed and our economy crushed by debt and irrational economic policies. We are now obligated to right our nation and help make America, America again.

The economy can certainly absorb the influx of holiday shopping and more people will be home to vote or know sufficiently in advance to request absentee ballots. Holiday-focused shows, events, classroom content, sales promotions, etc., can all help drive educated participation and motivate the population to be more informed of the candidates and positions. We can build a national message that leverages our past mistakes (from both parties) to enforce the importance of education, participation and the role of the populace to mandate responsible, effective government.

This new holiday will encourage our schools and media to educate and emphasize the responsibilities of the electorate to maintain the health of our democracy. With all due respect to exceptional educators, the national evidence of the past eight years proves that our educational and media system has failed our democracy. There is no better learning example of what can go wrong than the George W. Bush administration and how we failed to prevent its actions. As we re-educate our nation, imagine the potential quiz questions.

n Of these six acts by the Bush administration, which one is actually permissible under the Constitution?

n True or false, Vice President Dick Cheney controlled and determined more executive and policy decisions than President Bush?

n What is the estimated level of global competitiveness America forfeited that is directly attributed to the No Child Left Behind program?

n Extra credit essay: Defend either statement using at least five reference points — "In presenting the justification for invading Iraq, the Bush administration was a) incompetent or b) intentionally lied to the nation?

We face a long, hard uphill climb. Only by acknowledging our collective failure and recognizing how national apathy enables single-minded individuals to manipulate a nation, can we begin to heal our nation and to rebuild our economic and national strength. George W. Bush Day, will stress the patriotic duty of every American to fight through the propaganda, misinformation, irrational logic, bias news sources and then to question everything by participating in the debate and discussion required for a healthy and evolving democracy.

Communism taught in school shows how intelligent and educated people accepted the misguided logic and rational of a communist government and how most chose to follow, rather than question or fight back. We learned how the mass majority in these countries were driven into a rut by the ruling powers and were incapable of climbing out. We had always assumed that America was immune to this type of behavior. Well, America has proven that we too, can be led into a national rut. America needs to acknowledge and constantly remind ourselves what happened during the George W. Bush administration. The many manipulative acts of this administration must never be forgotten. We can never ignore how the conservative faction took a large lever labeled "faith" and drove it deep into the nation where it touched enough of the populace so too many of us aligned behind the calculated power grab. Then the national outrage from the 9/11 attacks was leveraged to accelerate our democratic demise as more citizens were driven into a deeper national rut, executive power expanded, and the conservative agenda enacted.