September 9, 2012

WHAT IF THE TEA PARTY RULES THE AMERICAN POLITICAL WORLD...

Epiphany!!! Early this morning as I walked along a Bucharest street, I had a vision.  What I experienced was not a religious experience but rather sudden insight concerning what could happen to my own country. I had walked out of the relatively opulent Bucharest Intercontinental Hotel into the working world of a typical large Eastern European city struggling with the realities of a global economy gone ballistic.  One very large region of Bucharest is a tightly packed congestion of old Communist era, Soviet style decaying apartment buildings which haven’t had any renovation or renewal for at least two decades and won’t get help in the foreseeable future.  The Intercontinental Hotel is part of a cluster of city center buildings that separate two cultures.  One obvious contrast between them is an opulent order on one side and barely contained disorder on the other.  The Office of Tourism says nothing about the poor part of the city characterized by poverty and decay, but  It describes the other side as the Paris of Eastern Europe... complete with a facsimile of the Arc of Triumph.  

In Romania today pensioners who worked during the old Communist days are struggling to get by on about $100 U.S. a month.  Working folks, laborers and professionals, are paid from $300 to $700 a month.  Life is hard. The more affluent, usually those who could game the system when the revolution came, live in comfort on the affluent side of the cultural divide.

So...  What if the Tea Party revolution is successful in overthrowing and dismantling the government of the United States?  My guess is that something like the conditions in Romania will be the result.  Already in America the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is wider than it has been since World War II.  If the right wing in the American political landscape prevails, the gulf will become wider.  The majority of voters who have bought into Rush Limbaugh’s and Grover Norquist’s vision are ignorant of economic and governmental forces. They are convinced that government is the problem. The typical far-right Tea Party voter clutches a dream of more personal benefit at less personal cost.  A dream of something for nothing motivates the right-wing voter.  Their distain for mothers who quality for food stamps and other forms of welfare assistance as “welfare queens” is a sad irony.  The typical ultra-conservative knows only the barest outlines of history if they know anything at all about it.  Few Republicans acknowledge, if they know, that it was during the presidency of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower that American income tax rates were higher for those who earned above-average incomes than at any time before or since.  Eisenhower knew that a leader must know and the cost of reaching goals in a campaign. When he was a general before he was president, he knew the importance of anticipating end results.  His goal of a strong America depended on developing a strong middle economic class that would be educated for responsible citizenship.  He and the people he appointed to administrative posts knew that a civilian army must be made made up of workers who would build highways and other infrastructure that could serve commerce and would meet the needs of all Americans.  Eisenhower recognized that the wealthy didn’t need help conserving their wealth.  He knew, as did the administration that followed him, help would be needed to build and strengthen the nation’s middle and lower economic base.  Eisenhower’s emphasis was not on preserving wealth of the richest Americans but on building a strong base.  It wasn’t until later that a Republican administration would promote a trickle-down economic plan that clearly favored the wealthiest Americans; and the line was swallowed hook-line-and-sinker by less informed Americans who assumed the richest people must also be the smartest and surely must know what was best for the country.  They believed in the brand of capitalism that is free from any governmental restrictions.  Although they decline to call it greed, they assumed that greed and unbridled ambition are powerful motivators to make everybody rich who works hard enough.  When a movie star president came along who insisted that a person who is rich already must surely know how to get rich and would lead all those who worked diligently to a personal fortune, the seeds of the Tea Party revolution were sown. We were encouraged to trust the wealthy to manage more and more of the nation’s resources.  The overflow would surely trickle down the rest of us. To meet their needs the rich would make work for those of us who recognized that we had bootstraps; and if we learned how to pull ourselves up by them, we would become rich too.  The idea was that we ordinary folks could build our own fortunes and eventually only the lazy would be left behind in poverty.  

Of course, it didn’t work out that way.  The majority of the wealthy want to stockpile and secure their assets rather than to rain down on the lower economic classes some of their excess.  A friend told me how the people in Malaysia catch a monkey. They take a coconut and make a hole in it and put in some rice.  A monkey comes along and puts its hand into the coconut to grasp the rice.  It remains caught because it is unwilling to turn loose of the handfull of rice, and with its fist clinched around the rice it is unable to get out of the hole.  

While some, of course, are not, many of the rich are trapped in their excess. The poor remain trapped in their poverty.  There is a way out for all of us.  It is appropriate, effective education that informs and sensitizes those people who have enough to the plight of people trapped in poverty... education that gives even the poorest Americans a chance to realize the traditional American dream of financial success and security.  We can do this. Si se puede.