To the editor:
On Saturday, Oct. 19, TDB’s lead headline read, “Government reopening answered prayer for many in Polk.”

The article, written by Leah Justice, describes some of the local “anxiety” and potentially “dire” consequences that were beginning to emerge. The article recounts that “panic ensued” at Country Bear Day School, with the owner even saying that “single fathers…have dropped to their knees crying.”

Anxiety! Dire consequences! Panic! Really? Panic? Men falling to their knees in tears because their taxpayer funded daycare subsidies may end? Seriously?

The point of the article is that God (assuming that’s who people were praying to) reopened the 18 percent of the federal government that had been temporarily suspended, thereby averting disaster and restoring weepy men to their senses.

Ms. Justice totally missed the lesson this almost-apocalypse should teach us.

The big lesson is not that “the Senate” and “President Obama” were beneficent instruments in the hands of God. The big lesson is not that God answers prayers through government subsidies.

The lesson is that “hundreds of individuals in Polk County” have become wards of the state. When funding withheld from 18 percent of the federal government causes grown men to fall to their knees in tears, it should shock us awake. The reactions described by Ms. Justice expose the shameful degree to which we have become utterly dependent on the umbilical cord of redistributed property. We as citizens of Polk County should be like the drunk who wakes up in his own vomit and cries out, “What in the world have I done to myself?”

I don’t know which “god” Ms. Justice thinks has addicted the citizens of Polk County to the narcotic of government dependency, but it is not a god I want to serve.

– Erick Allen