For at least a century the American system of government has been regarded with awe throughout the world, even by religious despots, immoral and amoral dictators and other megalomaniacs who hate the idea of democracy. In the time since I was born near the end of the Great Depression, the world has moved through difficult and frightening times. I was too young to be a soldier in World War Two and the Korean War. I was beyond the age to be drafted to fight into the Vietnam War, but I went to Vietnam in 1970 as an American civilian and saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the horrible consequences of war. In 1971 when my country and other countries of “the Free world” were engaged in something known as the Cold War, I visited Russia. I saw the woeful inadequacies of Communist government which caused the Soviet Union to fall apart. I have been as shaken as everybody else by senseless and absurd wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which almost everyone now agrees should never have begun. There is no system of government in the world that is better designed to meet the needs of all its citizens than one inaugurated in 1787 in the United States of America with the signing of the Constitution. The designers and framers of the Constitution built into it the system of checks and balances that American-born citizens learn when they are school children; and those that come to citizenship as adults, learn it before they swear allegiance to their adopted nation. The wisely designed system gives ours a resilience that less wisely designed governments lack. The American system of government was designed to survive, but it is not infallible.

There is extreme irony in a political movement that requires its leaders to wear American flag lapel pins while insisting that government is bad. The Tea Party threatens first the Republican Party; and if it should become the dominant political force in national politics, it conceivably could destroy the very system of government it claims to revere. This country benefits from having a strong, intelligent two-party system. Government is not America’s problem. The cultish Tea Party movement within the Republican Party threatens to destroy it. Replacing the traditional respectable, intelligent Republican Party with the political entity calling itself the Tea Party would be a disaster for the country. We need both major political parties to be strong and intelligent and supportive of American government, not distainful of it.

I Hear America Singing
by Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or
at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

One of the most amazing things about the American system of government is that it has built into it ways to help citizens who cannot help themselves.