I want to tell you a story about the snowstorm we’re having in the Midwest to make a point about my hopes for the coming New Year and decade.

I’m one of the people in the middle of the snow zone the last few days. The snow started on Christmas Eve during the day. The snow kept on all day and all night and continued into Christmas Day. We had some lulls on Christmas Day and my wife and I went out for a total of five hours just to take the top level off from the 12-14 inches we had.

The storm was like a strafing fighter plane. It hit us first moving south to north, then slingshot itself around a low pressure area to come back and hit us again moving north to south. The resulting drifts were incredible. One two story house across the way from me trapped the snow between its 8 feet high fence and the house and resulted in a drift up to the bottom of the second floor of the house.

When we got up today, we finally had a long lull. We live on a big cul de sac with 15 houses. The circle is oblong like a race track with park like interior islands (which are very convenient for the plows to pile the snow on, when we can get a plow.) There’s one connecting street about 100 yards long leading out of the cul de sac to a T intersection with the main road through the housing area. Looking at the volume of snow on the road led to the thought that getting in and out with anything less than 4 wheel drive was going to be damn near impossible.

Then like the proverbial saying of charging hell with a bucket of water, we had one of the younger residents of the circle get out with a snow shovel and start trying to clear a path down to the exit intersection.

The next thing you know, there’s a whole lot of the other residents out there with their snow blowers. It was the charge of the snow blower brigade.

There was no conference. There was no debate. There was just an example of leadership provided and a thought process that went something like this. Given this volume of snow, the fact this was an interior residential street, and the financial condition of the city the chances of our street being plowed in the next few days was probably slim to none. It took the city two weeks to clear the last major storm. So, we could either sit back and complain and be trapped in our own houses. Or, we could join together and do our own snow removal so we could freely come and go from our homes. We chose the latter.

I am very hopeful that we, as a nation, will take the same approach to resolving some of our own problems (particularly the economic ones). We will come to the realization that no one is coming to the rescue on our behalf as quickly as we can come to our own rescue and join together to make a solution happen quickly.

I wish you a very Happy New Year.

I intended to write about taxation this week, but given the state of the Health Care Reform legislation I want to focus my comments there instead.

Part of the motivation for changing comes from listening to the radio broadcast of one of the pro football teams’ game Sunday. Listening to a partisan radio broadcast is much different from neutral TV. What I was impressed with again (I also make this point in my book) is how clearly the color commentator called out what was happening on the field. That means the commentator was just as likely to say what his team was doing badly as he was to say what was being done well. The commentator was helped in this approach by two factors.

First, the focus of the comments was on a common and universal goal. That goal was winning the game in the face of opposition determined to win the game themselves. Second, the listening audience is knowledgeable of the game itself and understood its dynamics. An audience so knowledgeable is not susceptible to manipulation of the facts or posturing (better known as Spin in the political world).

So, here’s a question for you. If you’re elected to Congress, isn’t your job to find solutions to the problems of the interests of all the people and organizations in your district? I say yes. Notice I did not say you should represent . . .

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