RIGHT CHURCH, WRONG PEW

Yesterday several hundred thousand people turned out for John Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” on the Washington Mall. His themes; “Americans can get along and work together, but not their representatives in Congress” and, “24/7 cable media” focuses entirely upon negatives and antagonisms in our country, and so fuels the fires of fear begun by our politicians.

Later, there followed a CNN report on the “Tea Party Movement.” It was clearly designed to show them as a right wing fringe organization, expose their corporate benefactors, and decry the lack of qualifications of many of its candidates. There is more, however, that an objective observer got from both.

America has always been a multicultural society. It is our greatest strength, not our weakness. Yes, there have always been vocal minorities who have opposed civil rights, immigration, and tolerance, mainly because they have forgotten, or never been taught their own heritage of emigration to America and its reasons, but they have always, ultimately, been left behind by our always increasingly tolerant society. Left to our own devices, without the constant spotlight of media coverage, it will always be thus.

Americans have also always been a creative, industrial people with a formidable work ethic. While there are always a small minority who feel that the world owes them something, most want to earn their way through life with the dignity that brings. They also want to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit, unfettered by government controls over their individual freedoms, as long as they hurt no one else. To succeed, however, Americans must not be afraid to fail. Such failure must not mean poverty and death, but a chance to begin again with fresh ideas. When Thomas Edison was reminded that he had failed, thousands of times, to produce a light bulb before he succeeded, he answered that he never failed, but learned thousands of way not to produce one.

The “entitlement” programs that so many have now begun to question are not handouts, they are a safety net we owe to our own people because we are no longer Bronze Age nomads who must leave their sick and wounded behind to preserve the tribe. We are a modern industrialized nation whose least citizen deserves adequate food, clothing, shelter, education and health care, no matter what their current contribution to our society is. These are things we must do, not because they are easy, but because they are right.

The majority of Americans are not only middle class moderates, they are fed up with politics as usual. They are electing silly, sometimes totally unqualified candidates not because they believe they are the right people to server in Congress, but because the wholly partisan actions of the current representatives and senators have proven they are the wrong ones.

In 1867, Otto Von Bismarck remarked that “Politics is the art of the possible.” The time has come for our politicians to accept what he knew. We do not expect the absence of partisanship, but for each side to compromise enough so that each gets something. Government is about governing, not elections. Perhaps it is time for a moderate, non-aligned voting block to exist in Congress that becomes the “swing votes” needed to pass legislation. Perhaps, even a small number of these “Rogue” politicians will be enough of a roadblock to the “politics as usual” crowd to force them to work together once more for the benefit of their employers – WE THE PEOPLE.