Chapter Seven - part twelve

   That soon proved to be one of the biggest obstacles that James had to overcome. Politics seemed to be in the middle of everything that came along. Nobody wanted anybody to get even the smallest bit more than they did or to do the smallest bit more without something more done for them in return. The first month was consumed with 'working the system', as Hodges called it, to get things done. James was beginning to get his own 'system' in place by the end of that first month though. That system worked outside most of the politics. James had soon seen the need to change tactics and had done so quickly and quietly. The result was he was now running two separate briefings each day. One dealt only with the military and civilian people who were directly involved in matters out in the field. The people he trusted and depended upon. The other dealt with all of the people who wanted to have a say in those operations. James limited the amount of information made available to those people. Oh, he gave them all of the data, just very few of the details. As time passed things began to smooth out in the operations. People were seeing results and that was bringing more of them in to support what was being done, even if they didn't always know how it was being done. 

   James had found himself facing the President more than once to explain ruffled feathers of important people. At first he had plenty of support from the President, even if he did get lots of questions from him. As time passed that support waned as the amount of pressure increased from the people who were opposed to what James was doing. But even if the support had waned with the increasing heat; it was still strong enough to keep James out of the fire itself. The frying pan he was in was still hot enough to keep James dancing though. Spring was soon past and summer arrived with new problems. The nation was still a mess to put it mildly, but most of the major cities were up and running again. The rural areas were now the focus of more attention, but it was still the cities that were soaking up most of the resources. By late summer and early fall America seemed to be back on her feet again. They had more than doubled the size of the military; most of that increase was in the Army. Factories were running again and stores were open, but there were still major issues to be dealt with anywhere you looked.

    The government was still trying to supply well over half the nation with food and other basic requirements. The rest of the world wasn't much better off, so there was little help available. James had done all he could to get people working, but a lot of the young people in the major cities had never worked before. They had no desire to start now. They wanted things just like they had been and still were for them. They wanted the government support with no responsibility for their own care. James and many of those working with him knew that couldn't continue. The problem was that the politicians didn't see it that way. They just saw the need to keep the voters happy and content. They didn't see the cost and the results of that policy in the past had been the major cause of all of this; didn't see or maybe simply refused to see. Either way the results were a slowly building catastrophe in the making. One thing had changed though. A lot of the other people had seen the cost and the results of the failed policies of the past. They knew that things had changed and must continue to change or this recovery would be very short lived. Those people were ready to face the changes that would be required. At least they were willing to try.

    In the end that turned out to be the biggest problem of all for James. The people or their desire for change weren't the cause of his problems. The people currently in power were the cause of his problems. They didn't want the same kind of changes that the people wanted. They wanted things to go back to the way they had been. In effect they wanted to remain in control and have the people completely dependent upon them. They had seen the changes in attitudes of the people and had seen the direction that new attitude was taking the people and the nation along with them. If it continued they knew that the power they loved would slowly shift back to the people once again. The people would decide how things were run and who was in charge... and it might not be the politicians they elected anymore! It might soon be the people themselves who would be making the final decisions about their own futures. That wasn't acceptable to the current politicians or certain people who had actually put them in their positions of power. The people and the politicians all said they wanted to rebuild America. James wasn't sure if that was true for all of them. It seemed more like they wanted to remake America into what had been rather than rebuild it into what it could become. The most important question for James was what did they actually want to make America into? Until he could be certain of the final goal they had in mind; he wasn't certain that he could support that goal. He knew that to rebuild America they must first rebuild people's faith... and that meant they would first have to put God in power.  Somehow James didn't think that was a path the politicians wanted to follow. They seemed to be following a path to power for them not for God.