Saving America?

The T-Party continues to drive the Republican Party further and further toward … I’m not sure. They claim “freedom” and “liberty”, a USA to be proud of once again. They go so far as to claim that they are "saving" America. And yet here is what I see as the T- Party goals.

Abandoning the idea that civil rights are a good thing for all human beings and replacing liberty with the dictates of religious fundamentalism. Whose religious fundamentalism isn’t yet clear. It will be some sect of the Christian religion and will include a basic intolerance of any other world view. A USA that is caught in sectarian battles between various sects of Christianity sounds more like the Middle East than it does a place of which to be very proud.

Included in abandoning civil rights for all people is revoking equal rights for women. It is hard to imagine any woman who actually supports the idea that old, white men have the god given right to determine how women are allowed to live their lives. It is hard to image that most women think that they should not get equal pay for equal work and that they should have to carry every pregnancy to term, even those resulting from rape and incest.

Though the entire US economy is based on supporting the unrelenting pursuit of war, the T-Party seems the poster children for remaking the USA in the image of the Klingon Empire of Star Trek fame. Cutting taxes while expanding the military machine? (Haven’t we tried that already? And isn’t it a good part of the reason we are in the fix we are in?) Assuming that T-Party people can actually do basic math, I guess that means that roads, airports, waterways, public schools, libraries, National Parks, (the things I think of as the difference between a First world society and a Third World shit hole) are all things they are willing to sacrifice to their visions of a proud American.

(The assumption that these people can actually do basic math may be a poor one. These are the same people who look up at the stars at night, see light that we know has been traveling for millions of years, and then claim that heavens and the earth were created about 10,000 years ago. They can go to any museum in the country and see part of the fossil record, yet many insist that human kind and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time and that Noah’s flood was a real event. These are people who, literally, add 4 + 4 and come up with 11; then insist that theirs is the right view of the world as revealed by a god. Calling them bat-shit crazy may be an insult to bat-shit.)

Perhaps the thing I find most at fault with the T- Party vision is abandoning, vehemently rejecting really, the idea of social justice or collective compassion. Poor people suffer, hungry people starve, and unemployed people are abandoned; and that’s the way it is supposed to be. (Some of them insist that’s the way God wants it to be.) On the other hand trust fund babies and those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, who had nothing to do with earning the wealth they inherited, are coddled, praised, and by no means expected to pay anything to support the society that has taken such good care of them. To me this is pure evil and, (as The T – Party types are universally vocal about their Christian faith) does nothing to dissuade me that religion in general and American Christianity in particular, does far more harm than good in the world.

I am tempted to think that the T – Party types have to have some different view of themselves; that they can’t possibly want to live in the country they claim they want to create. But they have web sites; one can go read what they say, what they want, what they believe. If you go be prepared to see ugly crazy up close and personal. Be prepared to be saddened by the idea that these people claim to be patriotic Americans. And if you are frightened at the idea that these folks live next door and are heavily armed at least take solace in the fact that makes you one of the sane ones.

Oddly enough the T – Party types and I agree on at least one thing; the US is a failing state. They apparently think they can save it by driving the gays back into the closet; the women back into the kitchen, the workers back into the slave market, the children back into the sweat shops, and the brown people back across the borders. We Americans are obviously too educated, knowing the evolution is the way biology works, having some idea of the basic history of the cosmos, and recognizing that there are a lot of cultures and religions in the world and ours is just one among many. And apparently we are too healthy as well, daring to be concerned about things like smoking, obesity, chemicals in our food and poisons in the air and water. As soon as the T – Party succeeds in getting rid of the Department of Education and teacher’s unions, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Agency for Health and Human Services, OSHA, frees Wall Street from anything resembling regulations, and cuts Corporate Tax rates to zero, America will be saved.

I’m pretty sure they are wrong.

In any case, should their verson of America come to pass, it wouldn't be worth saving. It would be, in fact, beyond saving.