It’s not for the reason you might think. I mean there are many surface reasons for opposing the legislation recently signed into law. Just listing a few off the top of my head, there is the way the legislation was pushed through, how quickly it was moved through (I’m a fairly good reader and I can’t imagine getting through the 1300+ page document in that short of a time), and how partisan it ended up being in the end (don’t tell me about the three republicans voting for it in the senate, most people in the republican party don’t count them anyway). All of these things smack of what passes as normal politics these days. It’s not so much that it’s something new, it’s just that those in our capital are more brazen about it than they have in the past.
If you’ve noticed, I didn’t mention anything about the amount of money itself or how it’s being spent. I’m far beyond having any hope of the professional politicians spending the money they’ve been entrusted with wisely. I believe what we are seeing is the apex, zenith, whatever phrase you want to use of the quote (I believe it’s been attributed to both Benjamin Franklin and Alexis de Toqueville) “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
I’m primarily opposed to the basic idea of this law because of the mindset it produces. We have basically turned ourselves into a ‘no consequences’ society. You can mess up in your financial choices, you can basically fulfill all your fleshly desires, and we’re not supposed to have anything bad happen to us. I may not be very old, and I may not have seen ‘everything’ (although there are some days I say to myself ‘I can die a happy man, I’ve seen everything’) but the one thing I’ve learned from walking this planet is: there are always consequences. There’s no way around it. But, apparently we are certainly going to try. At least for those who have acted foolishly (at least with their money).
What I’m really getting at is: this particular bill has shown to me that we as a country and we as a people have fallen very far from the ideals this country was based on. As far as I can tell, the government this country started with is not the one we have now, and I’m not referring to amendments either. What I am referring to is the mindset of the people. We have more wealth and more resources available to us as a society than in any other time period, yet we are poor. The reason for this is: people in general are beholden to the state for their needs and wants as opposed to taking care of these things as individuals or as family units. More people today seem to be almost more than willing to give over things Americans fought wars about around a century ago. Why do we have people so willing to give everything, including those things our forefathers held so dear, over to the government? I think this quote from Teddy Roosevelt says it best: “The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”
Is it too late for our country? I’m not smart enough to say for sure, and I don’t have any better ideas than anyone else. But what I have seen so far, and seeing where we’ve come from in getting where we are today does not make me feel better.
No comments:
Post a Comment