We have all heard the rhetoric. Make America Greater! Let's return to the America we grew up in! Give us our country back! Back to basics! They sound good but do they think good? Do they really mean something? Anything? Reread, do you see that they only lead us to errors?

First of all we need to make America great before we can make it greater. You know the old saw about never being able to return home? Same way with the America we grew up in. It never was. It was our young, unaware view of our surroundings. Not the true condition of the country around us. We never had a country so how do we get it back? The back to basics I can buy except we never tried the basics? So what do I mean? Have you caught on yet?

We can achieve the America we envision when we use those rhetorical phrases. There are very basic and simple steps we can take to bring us to a more Utopian world. We can learn to decentralize, simplify life and become more efficient as organisms within our species. How so? Easy! Just follow me through a few steps and thoughts. If you will adopt my viewpoint and proceed to build your lifestyle around it, you may well wind up on the golden path to a Great America. With each step I will give you a why. The why may be more important than the what or how. The who will be you. It will be when if we start now.

Decentralize.

The simple step of decentralizing all of our endeavors will lead to untold savings, learning and social benefits. By decentralizing our school systems we bring our children closer to home. We can better control quality of education. We can better insure safety. We can deny those conglomerate corporations and unions from siphoning off local dollars in order to create powerful cabals of building contractors, keep materials purchases on the local level and provide teaching and administrative opportunities to our family, neighbors and friends. We can directly control what our children learn and how they are taught. We can choose the teachers instead of allowing some committee, commission or agency to hire them. Our schools will belong to us.

To the greatest extent possible we should make all energy generation a local affair. Solar, wind and other unused technologies can bring us greater personal and national security through independence. At the same time we keep money at home that would otherwise be sent to some great energy accumulator or hoarder. Travel by vehicle becomes more affordable. We will no longer be beholden to foreign nations with oil as their only contribution to humanity. We can be our own power company.

The same sort of thing can be done with transportation, refuse, information, publishing and economic endeavors. We can save trillions of dollars by becoming our own bosses or at least becoming part of locally owned and directed businesses that cater to our needs and not that of any one person, family, consortium or other entity or group anywhere in the world.

Prioritize.

What do we really need from our food? Nutrition and affordability. A back yard garden and raising chickens or learning to fish can provide both. Otherwise we buy from the farm on the edge of town. Winter? Learn to preserve, canning can be a wonderful way to keep food year round. Beyond that, we will save enough by prioritizing and decentralizing to afford supply from anywhere we wish.

Shelter can be reduced to that needed. Do we really need mansions? Better yet, do our schools, churches, entertainment venues need to be mansions? We can acquire those if we wish once we have our basics. If the homeless can live without mortgages and real estate charges and property taxes, can't we all? We need to quit using our habitat as a statement of ego or pride or power.

Clothing, much the same. Do we really need to support the world with shirts from Sri Lanka, shoes from Vietnam, trousers from China and hats from Brazil? Why can't we get this stuff at the seamstress down the road? Okay, I get it. You think I am simplifying a very complicated matter. So what? That is what decentralizing is all about. That is why we must prioritize. Why do we keep insisting on making our lives more involved and less content? Maybe we need to take a long think about where we are, where we should be and where we would like to be. Want a great America? Help make it by decentralizing and prioritizing our needs. One item at a time, one person at a time. Who will be first?

Use one thing to help change your thinking. Observe which way money and power flows around you. Change what flows out to flowing in. Quit sending dollars up channels that would be better sent to your neighbor. Don't pay for goods you can provide yourself. Don't require things you don't need. Once the powers that exist now begin to lose our support they will bend more readily to our needs. We can wean the banks and corporations from milking us to providing us with service. We only need to prove we are self sufficient. And we can be.

Here is where our future America really becomes both immediately available and highly adaptable to our individual needs. It also allows us to become financial wizards and master of our own fate. We can steal the thunder from the banks and corporations and those who have amassed power far beyond their ability to benefit. We will gain all the benefits of being an individual while remaining within our chosen community. Our first priority should be to only seek and obtain what we need. Gaining possession of things or commodities that we don't need is not necessary. What we don't produce for ourselves we can support our neighbors in providing us with goods and services.