Kaback: The American Dream and ice cream

Have any of you tuned into a news network recently? Any news network? Have any of you tuned into a news network recently? Any news network? C’mon, you don’t have to go all Sarah Palin meets Katie Couric on me. For those of you who have, how do you stand it? I don’t mean that as a joke. Literally, how can you stand to watch the news without throwing your ENS-alerted cell phone through the television?

For those of you who don’t watch the news regularly, let me sum it up for you: “Wah, wah, wah, a member of a different political party hurt my feelings and thus, hates America.” Or maybe it is more like, “In the great state of (insert the name of a state that is just mediocre), we don’t waste/cut money just because Obama/Republicans want(s) to start a class warfare/war on women and take away freedoms/rights and spit on the First Amendment/Second Amendment.”

I’m sick of it. Politicians talking this, politicians talking that, and all the while the issues that matter get thrown under the rug. Taxes, blah; Iranian relations, blah; health care, double blah! They tell me to look at Europe, or unemployment or a graph showing me how happy I am under their rule, but they never talk about what I want them to discuss: ice cream.

Have you tried to get a scoop of ice cream lately? It’s ridiculous. Unfortunately, those who are supposedly serving us in Washington just don’t seem to care about the plight of the average American. Do you think that they miss out on scoops of ice cream or go home to their children with sorbet?

It started with the cost. How can the President and Congress expect me to continue voting when they refuse to do anything about the inflated cost of ice cream? From $2 a scoop to $3 a scoop to almost $4 a scoop, how do they expect me to get to work in the morning? I wish that it ended there, but sometimes I need a milkshake. Every now and then, I want to have the chocolate-dipped waffle cone. But with costs increasing, there is no more room for luxury in America.

It’s not that I want a free handout of ice cream. I want to work for my ice cream just like I always have, when I at least used to be able to satisfy myself on a reasonable salary. We are becoming a nation of ice cream haves and ice cream have nots. It’s the American dream: study hard, work hard and get some ice cream. Unfortunately, that dream is becoming a reality for fewer and fewer Americans.

Then there is the entire issue of ice cream freedoms. Do you know there used to be just two kinds of ice cream? There was chocolate, and there was vanilla. If you liked chocolate, you were a normal person, and all the kids who ordered vanilla were mocked. Then, the politically correct police decided that the vanilla kids needed to be respected, so they introduced strawberry. Three flavors seemed a little excessive but were generally OK.

Now when I walk into an ice cream parlor, there are dozens of flavors. I can only pronounce about half of the vocabulary in the place, and they even have to give out free samples because so few people can actually understand what flavor they are about to taste. Think about how the costs are being driven up!

But here come the old gelato partiers to say that if one flavor is taken off the board, then freedoms are under attack! And instead of finding a way to compromise or work toward an acceptable solution, everyone just blames each other.

There are two sides of the aisle inside the beltway. There is one problem plaguing this nation, one issue that just needs a consensus to decide, yes, we can. Because if there is one thing I like about change, it is when it jingles in my pocket on the way to the ice cream parlor. But the two sides don’t want to figure it out, they just want to put the fault on each other.

With all of the finger pointing and blame games, there are innocent victims included in this: me, you and everyone who just wants a good scoop of ice cream after a long day. Because isn’t that what being American is all about ­— life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a cone?

So listen here President Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner, if you really want to show people that you care about your constituents, then you will do something about ice cream in America. I don’t care if you’re rallying cry is “Milk, baby, milk” or the “all of the toppings” strategy; I just want prices capped. I want to see them lower. I want to enjoy my life again.

Write Andrew at aak47@pitt.edu.