What about the future?

Apparently, there is "a wave of anti-incumbency" sweeping across our nation. Every day Americans are upset with our elected officials. They've failed to deliver. The nation is in debt, we're nine years deep in a war that we may or may not be winning, unemployment is high, and Americans are frustrated.

The response has been to take that frustration out on the people currently in office. Some of those people have been in office for a very long time, others are relatively new. Doesn't seem to matter, they gotta go either way.

There is some logic to this. When people do one thing for too long they can easily become complacent. Perhaps they've forgotten what they're supposed to be doing and take it for granted that political longevity is the product of outstanding public service. Lately, many people have suggested term limits, which I happen to think is an excellent idea. It's good to get some new blood into the government occasionally. Even the Tea Party is right about this, the one thing they have in common with our founding fathers is a fear of the king.

But there's another side to this story. As Americans, we're accustomed to success. We're a nation founded on success, and our history, with perhaps a few blips here and there has been one success after another. But do we take this success for granted and do we expect it too quickly? Take for example, America's current predicament. We're mired in a mess eight years in the making. Though President Bush wasn't quite as awful as he may have seemed when he was actually running the show, he left us in a bad spot. During his eight years, Bush led us into two wars, both of which lasted longer than his term. He took the unprecedented step of cutting taxes during a war, let alone two wars. And he did next to nothing to put America on a path towards a sustainable economy. All those mishaps took Bush eight years. But we want results from Obama in the Democrats in two? We've given the man three months of fix-it time for every year of disaster we gave the last guy. Buy Obama now, he's selling for 25 cents on the dollar.

Perhaps, when we're thinking about term limits, we should also think about term length. Our impatience is going to catch up to us. Because we're so accustomed to success, we expect it quickly, more quickly than is realistic. The end result is that we may end up undoing all the good that Obama HAS done in his two years. If we decide that Democrats have failed to deliver (an unrealistic assumption given the massive problems they inherited and the short amount of time they've had), we'll re-elect Republicans and in doing so, we'll mortgage our future. There isn't a magic bullet to solve our problems. Real problems take time to fix. Our nations faces real problems. We gave Republicans eight years to create those problems. Let's give Democrats at least four to fix them.

And in general, let's be more patient. John F. Kennedy once said, "we do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard." It's time we took a long, hard look in the mirror and realized that those words reflect America's greatness. JFK set us on the path for a long, hard trip to the moon. A trip well worth it. It's now time for America's long, hard trip out of recession, out of debt, and out of war.

Let's make America better today by being patient and having the foresight to think about America's greatness in the next decade, not just the current one. Let's give solutions time to work, and let's remember that fresh faces in our government are a good thing, but not so often that the old ones haven't had time to become that old.