She was born in a log building on a farm in Minnesota. Her father was an alcoholic and they were poor in cash like most rural families in those years. Her and her brothers never lacked for the wit to understand when someone was shining them on even though their education was almost all of the informal kind. Dinner around the table with those adults was always an interesting meal. My mother was the only remaining Catholic in the crew but the discussion was never about religion. It was always about neighbors or politics or both. The whole lot of them, she had three brothers, were Democrats. They all knew the Republicans were liars, but they didn't spare the Democrats either.

My older siblings participated in most of the conversations and nobody tried to enforce the old adage about being seen and not heard. You just had to have something pertinent to say about the topic under discussion. The average child sitting around that table already had more formal education than any of the adults by the time that I was old enough to pay attention. That didn't affect the fact that life experience and particularly the capability at discerning truth from lies gave the adults a substantial edge in those discussions. That whole generation of Americans is gone now, the ones born in the dawning days of the last century. We could sure use some of their skill at sorting out the lies and the truth today.

We are running toward the future and I wish there was some way I could help us slow down a little bit. I can't help thinking about a time when my body was still new and I was learning something every time the kitchen door slammed behind me. I got to observe the world first hand, with my nose in the dirt or the water or as far up in the air as the trees around could take me. My powers of observation were greatly enhanced by those four people who are no longer here. One of my uncles used to play a little game with me called, "what've you got in your pocket"? It was a game focused on me showing him what I had found that was interesting that day and us arriving at a price for it, either sight unseen, or after I reluctantly pulled it out and showed it to him. The game only continued as long as I told the truth about what I was hiding in that pocket. If I ever stretched the truth too far the game would end and we wouldn't play it for a few days. He never called me a liar, he just wouldn't play if I tried to abuse the truth in the process of us making a deal.

The American people have a lot at stake in these times, our prosperity is only as healthy as our middle class. The jobs that support that economic class are disappearing into the blank pages of a history yet to be written. Can we reverse that trend? I think we can and I have a plan for how we do that. First we need to train all of our kids to make a deal the way my uncle trained me. The roots of my entrepreneurial bent were formed while I was playing that little game. We need to take the time to teach our children and grandchildren how to play the game of life fairly and honestly. The rest will take care of itself in time. Liars are always found out eventually. Becoming believable again once you have lied to the public in a major way is really difficult. Richard Nixon lost the Presidency because of his lies not because he cheated in an election. Our nation is still the greatest place on earth. We simply need to retrain ourselves to be a little more skeptical about what our President has up his sleeve or in his pocket when he is committing us to war. We also need to learn a little lesson about economics, if somebody else has the money and you want it you need to have something to offer that can get them to part with it. Finally we need to remember that it is not the political party that matters but what the person involved says and does that counts. Check the actions against the words and you will catch the liar every time. God bless and keep you safe, now and always.