Friday, January 4, 2013

A Tea Party with Nothing to Celebrate

This was written a few years back when the Tea Party was beginning to make its mark and basking in the glories of 1776 was the thing to do. What we are beginning to realize now is that the Tea Party is capable of doing nothing. They are a roadblock. 

From what I have been able to gather, when our forefathers gathered themselves together, they came up with great ideas. It doesn’t seem like they spent a lot of time talking about the great ideas that came before them although they were certainly aware of them. But they seemed hell bent on making their own mark in history.

Many of today’s leaders, and few seem destined to ever be called forefathers of anything, seem hell bent on returning to the days of yesteryear. Their followers are marching right behind them, tapping their feet and clicking their heals, on this journey down the yellow-brick-road back to the good old days.

But those good old days weren’t as good as they were cracked up to be. And while many of the improvements of the last 200 years have come from the great free enterprise system created by those forefathers, just as many advancements have come from the government they put in place.

Going back in time is as fruitless as continually degrading progressives as if the alternative to progressive is something worth striving for.

The problems we have today are problems we have brought on ourselves and they are only problems because we have allowed them to become so. We can blame government all we want but this is the nasty little secret: We are the government and we want a lot. The problem is we all want different things.

Our forefathers wouldn’t even recognize the nation they created. Paved highways going to every corner of the country, buildings a thousand feet tall, oil wells two miles deep, a space station floating 150 miles in space and microscopic atoms being split in two and used to power cities. Medicines to cure every ailment, farms almost as big as the state of Rhode Island, fifty thousand people leaving their homes, getting in their cars and driving to a football game fifty miles away and then returning to their home the same day.

Our forefathers wouldn’t know where to begin to solve today’s problems, though in all honesty I think they would make a better effort. At the very least they would push for compromise. So why does a small segment of our society insist that going back to the world of our forefathers is the answer to today’s ills? In all likelihood, given the complexity of today's world, our forefather would probably be astonished that the government isn’t bigger than it is.

Wearing three-cornered hats is cute and waving 1776 flags can be fun but anyone who thinks that solving today’s woes is all about shrinking the government and then waiting for everything to fall into place is nuttier than King George III was when he thought the men leading the revolution were a bunch of country bumpkins. We are a bigger nation with bigger problems in need of bigger solutions

Another thing about the forefathers. They had more on their minds than winning the next election or retaining their leadership post. That is the real reason we still talk about them today.

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