(During your campaign and victory celebration, you said you wanted to hear from people on Main Street as well as from people on Wall Street. Well, our little publishing company is located on Main Street in Rockford, Illinois, and here’s a report on what people are saying in our neighborhood.)

Dear Mr. President:

We want to believe what you said about ending or “winning” the war in Afghanistan by increasing our troop deployment there, but we just cannot — for many reasons. Following are six of those reasons:

First, those of us who are old enough to remember President Johnson’s speeches as we got deeper and deeper into the Vietnam quagmire had an eerie feeling that you were merely reciting one of his old speeches with the names and places changed. In other words, we’ve heard it all before, about how the fall of Vietnam (or Afghanistan) would undermine our national security and pose a threat to the free world. Vietnam fell after thousands and thousands of Americans were sent to their deaths there and even more thousands of Vietnamese died in the fighting, but none of Johnson’s dire predictions came true. That experience has made older Americans less gullible and less susceptible to believing politicians’ fear-mongering.

Second, we are becoming a little cynical about virtually every institution in our national life. We have been lied to by our government. We have been lied to by the media. We have been lied to by the education establishment. We have been lied to by the environmentalists. We have been lied to by the health care industry. We have been lied to by corporate business leaders. We have been lied to by the entertainment industry. We have even been lied to by religious leaders. In light of that precipitous moral decline in all areas of American life, you shouldn’t be surprised that we’re a little wary of what you said about Afghanistan, particularly when your head bobbed back and forth from teleprompter to teleprompter as you spoke, as though you were an actor on stage reciting lines.

Third, we thought it was in particularly bad taste to orchestrate your performance in the auditorium of Eisenhower Hall at West Point. How could we fail to recall Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial alliance that wrings such heavy profits out of war? (Actually, Eisenhower had cited the military-industrial-congressional complex in his original text as the people who make the most money out of sending other people to their deaths in combat.) We probably would be more willing to believe you if you said you had found a way to take the profits out of warfare and to spread the suffering now borne by our military and their families.

Fourth, we were astounded that you referred to our recession or depression as something “we just came through.” Your friends at Wall Street may have just come through it, but I assure you those of us on Main Street have not. On the contrary, we are braced for the new and deeper recession next year when your Wall Street giveaways will come back to haunt us in higher interest rates, high inflation, even higher unemployment, and even more foreclosures. What were your speech-writers smoking when they wrote that line?

Fifth, some of us who served in the military during the Vietnam debacle and studied warfare during those insane days remember the suggestion by JFK’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Education and Manpower Resources that we need “troops which are politically expendable, the kind of troops who can be killed and maimed "without too great a political outcry in a nation like our own which so abhors war.” You and the Joint Chiefs of Staff may consider the 30,000 men and women you’re sending to Afghanistan as “politically expendable,” but many, perhaps most of us on Main Street do not.

Sixth, your spending on the war is repeating Johnson’s reckless spending that nearly destroyed our economy then and is even more likely to do so now, as your Chinese advisors pointed out during your visit there. Already soldiers are coming home from deployments and wondering what they were fighting for when they see how many of our communities have been decimated by the policies of the government and corporate types who have profited while the soldiers’ comrades in arms fell by their sides and Americans' jobs were shipped overseas.

I will provide more feedback from Main Street for you later with more reasons why we would like to believe you, but cannot. Right now my wife is telling me to get back to work. You know what they say about keeping first things first. That's the title of one of my books. You may want to read it before you make any more decisions that make your Nobel Peace Prize look like a bad joke.

Wishing you a nice day.

John Gile

Beleaguered citizens of what many regard as the most mismanaged and politically corrupt state in the nation woke up today to find themselves the target of a new Illinois law enforcement scam masquerading as part of a nationwide crackdown on one of America’s most serious crime problems — seat belt violations. State and local efforts to nab hardened and remorseless non-bucklers include numerous seat belt enforcement zones designed to capture unwary violators in the act.

“At first I thought it was an April Fool’s Day joke,” one Illinois driver said, “then I realized it isn’t April. The Click it or Ticket campaign means either Illinois law enforcement has suddenly cleared our streets of crime and eliminated the drug dealers, gangbangers, and child-killers, or we have too many police officers without enough real police work to do. The bureaucrat who came up with this asinine idea must be a leftover from Blagojevich’s days in Springfield. Next thing you know they'll be cracking down on drivers who pick their noses while they’re behind the wheel.”

Within hours after launching the campaign, a specially trained seat belt swat team apprehended 83-year-old Gladys Brusco, known as “No-Belt Gladys” in seat belt crime circles. The notorious violator was arrested and locked up in Winnebago County jail after leading seven state, county, and city police cars on a three mile chase at speeds reaching 35 miles per hour before she pulled into her church parking lot and surrendered at gunpoint.

Seat belt lobbyists triggered the crackdown with a public relations campaign attributing recent declines in traffic fatalities to seat belt use. Brusco’s backers gathered outside the county jail chanting “Let Gladys go!” and waving placards showing that the declines actually result from reduced travel and reduced speeds because of the high cost of gasoline. Legislators responsible for the law did not return phone calls.