Ok... O.K! I know I'm stuck in a rut with Iceland poppies, which I've learned are not native to Iceland but to Northern North America and Asia. This is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays I meet a couple of friends for coffee early in the morning in Mission Valley, and my bike ride to the coffee shop takes me past beds of these poppies; and I can't resist them. There is a melaluka tree beside one of the beds, and I can't resist that either.

Today's BLOG writing has nothing to do with poppies.
POOR OLD MISUNDERSTOOD THOREAU

It is certainly true that Thoreau wrote, and undoubtedly said, that the government is best that governs least. What is also true is that Thoreau respected government in much the same way that he respected individuals. What he expected of both individuals and government was that they should be guided by conscience. He objected to any government or to any individual or groups of individuals who act as agents of injustice. The essay from which ultra-conservative Americans take their favorite sentence was written by Thoreau at a time when he was appalled by American government’s tacit approval of the institution of slavery by actually enacting laws that laid out the responsibilities of owners and slaves and by enforcing those laws. He was also dismayed by the Mexican-American War and believed that responsible American citizens should insist that their government put a stop to both the war and to slavery.

One can talk, as Thoreau did, about the rights and duties of the individual in relation to Government without hating the idea of government... which Beck, Limbaugh, Bachman, Palin, and a very vocal but relatively small group of political pundits clearly do. Thoreau was a proponent of responsible government that is driven by social conscience. Obviously, when citizens, the governed, are people of good conscience, specific guidelines and directions from government are redundant and unnecessary. But alas, not all citizens are people of good conscience, and at times even the majority can be wrong; and it has been at those times that the masterfully composed Constitution of the United States saves us from catastrophe. Thoreau died a year after the Civil War started. He longed for a time when slavery would end and government’s laws dictating the terms by which an individual citizen can own other individuals as slaves would be unnecessary. When Michelle Bachman implies that Thoreau thought government was unnecessary and the cost of government was an unnecessary burden and cost to citizens, she is showing not only her ignorance but her apparent inability to to do critical thinking. Thoreau did no such thing. Representative Bachman should actually read Thoreau’s essay; and if she can’t manage to understand it, she should give the President of the United States a call. He does understand Thoreau’s essay, and he is an expert on the Constitution of the United States.

World history contains a long list of examples of chaos and ultimate disaster resulting from anarchy. Our nation is on the verge of one of those times when the inmates are getting dangerously close to running the asylum. We are close to economic melt down; and the Tea Party folks, apparently unable to see that their plan for shrinking government would actually shrink further the American middle class, the group of people in American whose work pays for the good life that we have celebrated since the beginning of the Republican Eisenhower Administration. Having graduated from high school during the Eisenhower years, I have tracked in my adult lifetime the periods of prosperity and the periods of retarded development in my country. Through the administrations of eleven presidents of the United States, I have witnessed the surges forward by the middle class and its periodic slides backward. The Tea Party folks are trying to rewrite history by claiming that words and ideas which they hold dear were actually said by revolutionaries like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin... and by subsequent writers and politicians like Thoreau and Lincoln. Checking facts is strangely more difficult in this digital age, because politicians who want to confirm what they desperately want to believe to be true go to Google and Google sends them to each other’s speeches and writings. They have developed a strategy that doesn’t find facts and truth but skillfully compounds and perpetuates ignorance by obscuring context... and context for a statement like "government is best that governs least" is essential if the author's meaning is to be clearly understood.

Thoreau would be appalled by some of the political ideas attributed to him in Washington and around the country by people on the stump. I have no doubt that he would approve of an American health care program that addresses the plight of the poor whose health needs are often not met. Thoreau died of tuberculosis, a disease which often goes undetected in poor populations in America.