Where oh where can it be?
Oh where oh where did my country go
Radicals have taken it from me.
We voted for change. Obama said he would transform America and indeed a transformation has taken place. Race politics which had been sidelined and marginalized into the property of overt racists has risen again to the forefront. Accusations of "racist" fly freely and an atmosphere of race fear has been stoked and nurtured creating an absolute stench. Congressman Maxine Waters, long known as a race baiter and race apologist has risen to new heights by accusing her accusers of racial motivations. We have entered some kind of space-time warp where the country based on the rule of law has become the country of rule of race. It's disgusting.
How do we expect to use anything that is going on in politics as a model for our children? What can our children learn from this state of affairs? Here's some lessons they might learn:
1. Politicians lie. They have to lie to get elected and to stay in office.
2. Politicians are crooks. They all cheat, steal, misappropriate funds, dodge taxes and lie, lie, lie.
3. Politicians think they are better than everyone else. Remember back in grammar school when there would be class elections? The popular kids always won. They would lord their popularity over other kids in the class as if they were somehow better. The rest of the class were happy just to be in the presence of these "popular" kids. What a joy to be selected on one of these kid's team for 4-square. Of course, as soon as one of their real friends got on the court, they would turn on the odd ball and once again would rule supreme by working together to get rid of any interlopers.
4. Politicians think that we are stupid. While they might give speeches about how smart their constituents are, they really have contempt for them. Out in California there is a congressman named Lois Capps. She's singularly unqualified for the job and gets elected partly from sentimentality because her husband died while in office and partly because her district includes Santa Barbara which is just slightly less liberal than San Francisco. Election time is coming up so all of a sudden, people start getting newsletters from her office "informing" everyone of all the great legislation she has initiated and how she is doing so much for the area. She's an opportunist, liar and manipulator who thinks people are so stupid that this will pass for real work of which she does very little. But basically, politicians think they have answers and assume that because they are elected and have opinions that they are intelligent. Somehow they have forgotten that their opinions are no better than another's.
5. Politicians think that they are above the law. These are elected officials and through bribery, lies and manipulation stay elected if they can. Laws that apply to everyone else except the government elite don't apply to them because they are part of that elite. How else could anyone explain the disgraceful behavior of Edward Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne? He swims across the narrow inlet to his house and calls emergency crews eight - yes it was eight hours later - hours later to report the "accident. Of course, he remembered to call all his political advisors first. Meanwhile, Mary Jo was fish bait. Yet our intrepid Senator was reelected again and again. If that situation had happened to any ordinary citizen, that person would be in the slammer. Of course, his wife was understanding. Sure. She understood that if she made too big a stink, she would risk her elite status. Maybe John Adams can write another "grand" opera based on "The Death of Mary Jo."
6. Republicans and Democrats are exactly the same but cast themselves as poles apart which is another lie. How do we really show our children the differences between the parties? While there may be parts of the parties that are more extreme, the average party member is the same kind of person both politically and intellectually for both parties: The average guy/gal wants prosperity, safety, opportunity and freedom. Politicians know that and cater to that while lining their pockets with raise after raise while making speeches about how congress spends too much money. If a private companies behaved as politicians, their CEOs would be in jail. Actually in the few cases where they have been caught, they are in jail. But the crimes committed by CEOs are dwarfed by those committed by politicians and all the politician gets is a reprimand.
7. Politicians make sure their cronies and big supporters are "taken care of" with lots of benefits and opportunities but anyone else with an idea, regardless of how much merit the idea may have, can beg until he is hoarse and his knees bleed and the request will go unheeded. Someone I know, worked for the McCain campaign. They put a lot of hours in and actually got to meet him. This person's child wanted to go to West Point and wrote a letter asking John to give a recommendation. What did this individual get back? A proforma letter from an aide which stated that McCain only gave recommendations to "large contributors" and "personal" friends. What kind of BS is this? In other words, my acquaintance didn't give John enough money to warrant a recommendation. Silly me, I thought the were supposed to be for kids who showed enough moxy and worked hard enough to be successful at one of the service academies. What a joke. It doesn't have anything to do with the applicant but has everything to do with how much silver crosses John's palm. What a great lesson this was. I'm sure the kid learned a lot from this futile exercise.
What we have is a government that we were given a Bill of Rights by our founders to prevent from happening. They warned us about such a government and envisioned the possibility that such could take place so they gave us tools to protect us from exactly what our government has become. But our tools have been blunted by the very government they were designed to protect us from. The tools have been reinterpreted in such a way that a hammer is now a saw and a screwdriver is a level. In other words, the tools have been so recast as to be barely shadows of what they were. As interpreted by our elected politicians over the years, the Bill of Rights has become a document of words rather than concepts. Who would have figured. Not the founders because if they had, they would have warned us about "interpretations" of the Bill. Oh wait, they did. Jefferson even thought we should have an armed revolution every twenty years to clear out the deadwood and revitalize the core concepts. But who reads that stuff anyway other than scholars looking to reinterpret the simple words for whatever purpose they deem important. I have been told that the Bill of Rights can't apply today because the founders never envisioned the complex world we live in. What a crock. They wrote it the way they did because they knew everything would change technologically but that people would still be motivated by the same truths they found important.
There's an interesting movie called "Instinct." It is about a gorilla expert who lived with gorillas in that wild. He is accused of murder and found to be mentally incompetent. He's put in an asylum where he runs afoul of everyone. He's asked about gorillas in a zoo and he replies that those a not real gorillas but shadows of gorillas. Real gorillas live wild and have social structure and live differently. Well, our Bill of Rights has been so interpreted that it is not much more than a shadow of what it is supposed to be. Government has seen to the demise of the very document meant to control that same government by politicians who operate from ideologies that are so far removed from those of the founders that there are no similarities.
Someone took the Bill of Rights to the streets of New York and asked people to sign it as if it were a petition. Few recognized the document and most people thought that they were advocating the overthrow of the government. Not many signed it and a few argued against it. What does this tell us? Maybe we are as stupid as politicians believe.
So how do we get out of this situation? How do we return to our core values and principles without going backwards? After all, the world has changed and other than a violent revolution which destroys everything, how do we go about reinventing ourselves in a way that gets rid of the excesses, controls government and expands freedom without losing some of the benefits good government can provide?
From time to time, I will posit what I think are possible solutions. Feel free to agree or disagree as the muse moves you. All the post will bear the title "Reinvention."
FB
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