Republicans have made hay out of what they claim to be a prevalent disgust with American government. They say that citizens of the United States of America don’t like their government, but they’re overlooking one important factor: The citizens of the United States of America have made their government – at the federal, state and local level.

Government in the USA is an expression of what people want. It’s government by the people, of the people, and for the people. People all over the world are struggling to get the kind of government system we have here in the United States. Why hate the government?

It’s true that there are big corporate and religious organizations that try to use money to twist our government to their selfish purposes. In such cases, though, it’s not the government that’s to be disapproved of, but the private organizations who are trying to take the government away from citizen control.

Government itself, when established through democratic processes, is something that ought to be defended, not cut apart. We would do well to remember that those organizations which criticize “big government solutions” would like to replace government solutions with big corporate solutions and big church solutions that are most certainly not democratically-established, and are not representative of the will of the American people.

All across the country this week, people are rising up in protest – and they’re not protesting for cuts to our government. They’re protesting against them.

I’m not just talking about the labor union protests, which are considerable, radiating out from Wisconsin across the entire nation. A group of workers from all 50 states gathered in protest in Washington D.C. over the weekend.

I’m also talking about the one thousand students in Boise, Idaho who walked out of class in protest against budget cuts that will force teachers to be fired. These students are marching for public education, a government solution, because they know it represents the best opportunity they’ve got.

Today, another set of pro-government demonstrations will be taking place in 75 locations across the United States. These protests will be against the 1.7 billion dollars in annual cuts to Social Security that were passed by the House of Representatives a week and a half ago.

What? You didn’t hear that the lower house of Congress voted to cut Social Security? No, of course not. The message from the Republican Party was kept quite generic. The GOP kept talking about cutting government in general, working hard not to get specific about the actual cuts that would produce actual economic harm for huge numbers of Americans. Those specific cuts included the 1.7 billion dollars in the annual budget of the Social Security Administration, which would slow down Social Security checks to retired Americans, to widows and orphans, and to workers who have been injured on the job.

These cuts, if approved by the Senate and signed into law, would be a brutal lesson to Americans in just how important a big government, created by a big nation of citizens, truly is.