The T-party in action, not the idea or the more carefully (politically) stated phrases, is an angry, intolerant, atomistic impulse that has proven itself to be selfish, heartless, incoherent, and insulting to the revolutionary patriots that it makes the pretense to imitate.
Don’t we all agree, with that great Roman Senator, Seneca, that “anger, drunkenness, fear, and the like, are base and fleeting excitements and do not give arms to virtue, which never needs the help of vice?”
Yet pundits and politicians celebrate the “anger” of the T-party movement, say it’s understandable, and thus tolerate in adults what would prompt a parent to discipline a child.
We have seen these self-proclaimed saviors disrupt public meetings, insult public officials, slander opponents, and shout down those who disagree, all in defiance of that bed rock democratic principle, that we all enjoy freedom of speech, and not just the self-appointed righteous.
The supposed justification for their anger and misconduct is that the government has done us wrong.
Well the original T-party actors, when dumping Tea in the harbor, had no redress.
Merry Old England treated the colonials to subservient misery without a right of representation in their parliamentary councils.
But we in the modern Americas have representation and we’ve lately come to the awakening that it has fallen way short of curbing the excesses of Wall Street and the money lenders who broke this nation’s economy and, according to some experts, marginalized every other economy in the world.
It is because our elected representatives are mostly bought and paid for by malefactors of wealth who care only about their bottom line and not a bit about our welfare.
The T-party answer is no better.
They argue that the wealthy need do less, and need not pay their fair share in taxes.
It’s an open secret that the T-party’s most visible and televised confabs have been financed by the wealthy who want “limited” government, fewer regulations, so they can increase their profits while freely spewing poison into the air and water, and concocting the next great financial hoodwink that will top Enron and the mortgage loan scandals.
The T-Party shamelessly invokes Christ in its cause but surely Christ would curse them as hypocrites for disregarding his sermon on the mount, given that the T-party decries any role for government in the “welfare” of citizens struggling to recover from natural disaster, needing to be tided over when unemployed, joining working hands to bargain for fair wages and working conditions, staving off illness and hunger, or making more secure the fragile aged in their years of retirement.
At the core of the T party’s political “thought” is the wrong-headed notion that this nation was founded on “limited” government.
In fact, our founders rejected limited government as ineffective – when they discarded the “Articles of Confederation.”
It was a deliberate and conscious action that many believe was prompted by revolutionary solder Daniel Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts attacking banks and the courts of law for confiscating their homes when their mortgages went unpaid.
George Washington wrote, “Let us have a government by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once.”
The resulting constitution in 1787 created that strong central government to unite the country as one, to promote the “common” defense but also the “general” welfare of “we,” that is, all “the people of the United States.”
The T-party objects to what is “common,” to what is meant by “welfare,” even that there is a “we,” who need to spend, tax or borrow to advance the constitution’s stated purposes.
The T-party seemingly favors anarchy over any government - and that’s a toxic brew.
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