By Paul Wertz
I need help, man. I need a label. Everywhere I look, people have clear "liberal" or "conservative" labels.

Someone help me - what am I?

For openers, I want most of what's left of our livable environment protected. On the other hand, I want to expose those who stop at nothing to prevent, let's say, a freeway project because they are against corporate profits of any kind.

I want our country to remain militarily strong, but I don't want a dime more spent than is reasonable - and I want this nation to go to war only when there is a real threat.

I want our extremist political leaders to keep their hands off our children's educational curricula, but I want some system to weed out the teacher and professor drones who hide from reality, and behind tenure, and add nothing to the lives of their captive youth.

I want us to leave gays and lesbians alone, and I want gays and lesbians to stop marching in parades just to rub their lifestyle in the faces of heterosexuals.

I understand the highly charged emotions of those who oppose abortion and the equally indignant position of pro-choice people who don't want the likes of Pat Robertson dictating how they should live. I prefer that they combine their efforts and work toward a society that doesn't get itself in the position of needing abortion in the first place.

If a person's witness-stand lies cause the execution of an innocent human being, the witness can be punished. I agree with that. By the same token, if a president or vice president lies about another country's threat to us and takes us into a war that causes the deaths of thousands of innocent people, I want them to be impeached, if not imprisoned.

I want there to be a safety net for the unfortunate, and I want full prosecution for those who abuse society's generosity - whether it is a welfare recipient or a multimillionaire CEO.

I want our borders sealed tight until we sort out all of the human and environmental problems in this country. If the only way we can get our crops picked is to hire immigrants, I want those immigrants transported free from the border to assigned farms, paid a decent wage and transported free back to the border at the end of the harvest season so they spend their wages in the country they came from.

I want most street drugs legalized under a system that makes users register, get their supply from a government outlet and agree to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; concurrently, I want penalties for selling or buying outside the government system to be life in prison.

I want vehicles to be taxed based on weight and engine displacement, and I want our government to heavily subsidize promising private sector inventions that liberate us from Middle East oil nations where they burn our flag and stone women for being so undisciplined as to get raped.

I want to know what our elected officials are doing, and with whom they are doing it. Politicians who hide information should spend prescribed amounts of time behind razor wire.

I want the news media to be free to report any news they discover and to fully protect their sources, and for there to be an intelligent electorate that learns to sort facts from nonsense and to switch the channel or change subscriptions when it suspects it's being fed the latter. Actually, on this one I don't have a counterpoint, or any hope.

I want taxes to be reasonable and for there to be no spending, except on an emergency basis, by Congress or our state legislatures outside of a single budget bill per year onto which no rider of any nonspending nature may be attached.

On the other hand, I want those who make the most to provide the bulk of the money to keep our country safe, clean, well educated and healthy. And, I want there to be no place on Earth where corporate fraud can hide its income from our tax system.

I want to make it impossible, except in time of true war, for this nation to burden our children and grandchildren with huge national debt. At the same time, I want our federal and state governments to operate on a zero-based budget system that essentially assumes each and every dollar in future budgets must be justified as if it were a new proposal.

I want us to, at all times, make the first order of business of this society the protection, happiness and education of all our children, regardless of the sacrifice we adults must make.

There is more, but I have to stop now and go have a political debate with myself.

Paul Wertz of Eugene is a - well, it's kind of hard to say what he is, besides being a retired public information officer for the California Department of Fish and Game.